Read on Twitter
As far as I'm concerned the coming decade is the most crucial one with regards to Indian defence acquisitions. WE HAVE TO SPEND HARD AND LARGE. Either in DEVELOPING or ACQUIRING TECH. Another round of license manufacturing boondoggle is like shooting ourselves in the foot!!
If we miss this decade, we would ever be handicapped and be dealing with playing catchup on crucial technological gaps or be developing "also ran" products in segments where excellence plays a key role. Identify gaps. Fund competing development projects liberally.
And specifically focus should be on doing great what we can do good. And continuous improvement of products at rapid pace. Accuracy, sophistication, light weighting no compromise on performance should be the name of the game. We need a Kennedy Moon mission moment here.
We need special funding for pvt sector R&D. Apart from the Academic research, CSIR research and DRDO funding that is planned. That will focus on MSME and startups in the R&D domain. Big companies will take time to ramp up R&D. Small companies can make difference in tech faster.
You create more jobs in the R&D domain, trickle down jobs get created in multiples. And the long term returns for the country is many times more than manufacturing alone. The world has moved on from labour premium to capital premium to knowledge premium. We need to realize that.
Knowledge is the hot commodity for the first half of this century. Not capital or labour. We seem to focus on the latter 2 but forget the first. In any product of today, IP forms the bulk of the value. Material and labour very less.
We saw during and post Cold war, how technological dominance is deciding the Gross National Power of different countries. Credible defense capabilities of nation states are not entitlement. The country that dominates tech and continuously innovates, wins and marches ahead.
We are seeing this everyday in the LAC and LoC front. Just because we are a 10 times larger economy than Pak doesn't make us automatically entitled to differentiating weapons. As a matter of fact this is true for every aspect of the nation and not just military tech.
