Firstly.. I must say this is a really good piece of work by DRDO and very well done!
Now lets talk reality. I think we need to refocus DRDO efforts on: 1) really day-to-day needs of jawans. Advanced armour, better communications, better and more mobile medical systems, long lasting self heating food packets ( during Kargil our soldiers ate shakkar-paare (a north Indian sweet), sattu and rotis -to me thats not good enough). Better border intrustion systems is another.
2)Let us rethink whether we need to build strategic systems from the ground up all by ourselves. I am not sayiong all- but a few Could we have developed the LCA in 10 yrs if we had a JV with Isreal or other friendly nations? Isreal already has a very advanced tank called the Markaba (google it if you want to). Could we have partnered with them to produce the next version of the Markaba and used that as MBT instead of the Arjun? 2) We can partner with Hyundai industries to make Naval ship hulls for us - and we do the internal systems. Hyundai makes full super container ships in 10 months flat - surely they can make ship hulls for us. 3) Instead of LCA, we should concentrate on UAV and armed UAV.
Lastly, I cannot belive that DRDO conroller said that it would need just one test to ratify the missile! surely rediff has got it wrong. It takes 100's of test flights to make a missile operations. Somethings wrong!
