Further licence production does not impart any meaningful technology. The most intensive ToT ever was the Su30MKI project. But then what?
Licence production gives us the technological skills/means to build only that aircraft.
The amount of data we have on AL31 engines, the technology of the radar .... But alas the agreement does not allow us to use it anywhere else.
China got hold of drawings of maintenance from Ukraine for different parts of Flankers and within a couple of years ditched J11A( Su27 built in China with Russian kits) to move on to J11B (Russian Engine , Chinese Flanker)
That's absorbing and using technology.
We want those types of results with our method. Not possible.
You get thousands of trained manpower. The alternative is no aerospace ecosystem itself.
People always confuse the two. "Oh, we got AL-31FP ToT, so that means it can be used on Kaveri..." NO!!! They are completely independent of each other. There is quite literally no relation between the two. Manufacturing ToT doesn't help R&D directly anyway. But when our own R&D needs production, we need the trained manpower that has been building the AL-31FP all this time to also build the Kaveri. Without the trained manpower, even if we develop our own engine, we are unlikely to produce it because there's no one with such an experience. Then, we will need 10-15 years just to get manufacturing right, no different from how Tesla struggled with production for over a decade.
When we import and produce the jet, we get trained manpower but also possession of technology. The mere possession of technology gives us the ability to create new requirements. If we do not have someone as smart as Steve Jobs in the country, then we need access to a smartphone he's made to gain some experience on it before we can duplicate it. Imports gives us access to foreign "inventors", whereas in India, we are not yet inventing, we are only innovating. We are basically reinventing the wheel.
Someone or the other is always creating disruptive technology that no one knows about. Imagine if only the US used smartphones and no one else in the world even knew about it. Then how are you gonna make your own smartphone if you don't even know it exists? Our scientific pool has been pretty clueless for decades, they are still in the process of catching up. So, until that happens, we need to import jets to gain full access to new technologies, and also assistance, if not ToT, in developing such tech so we can do it on our own.
