The article here from times quotes that a large portion our defense equipment still consists of parts from other countries. While blaming the government for allocating a smaller budget for defense research it also throws a handful of flak on DRDO, India's Defense research organization.
On one hand while i feel that there is definitely a lack of discipline in the way some of our defense organizations work, i do not entirely blame them. As with any research organization there are a lot of slacks in DRDO as well. However, in spite of this we are have Tejas which flies. We have the HAL produced, Dhruv which also bags us some international orders. While we can endlessly debate if the current situation is justified in its true sense or could have been better, I would like to present an alternate view here.
To be able to achieve something, we should start dreaming about it and be able to visualize it. In order to be able to visualize something it should be something that is presented always in the good limelight. for example, the American army veterans are almost always glorified for their services rendered to the nation, albeit at times they might have hardly set foot off the American soil. In India great scientists like C N R Rao, get the front page only when he makes a controversial statement (in the view of the rest of the nation), that a majority of the IT companies are having IT coolies working for them.
I remember my colleague in college who presented a paper on "Counter-Counter Intelligence" and how technology was doing good there. He had the dream and the perceived his goal like a devil.Today he holds a Ph.d and works in pure research area. Had we produced more such geniuses we wouldn't have had to worry about the lack of discipline in our organizations. The reason why we do not produce such people in bulk is because no one really glorifies these career paths. He is just pushed around as a professor who had nothing in his life but to learn. Isn't it true that IT had presented India with a golden opportunity to do what we couldn't do with the 1000 years of technology, but we screwed it up and ended up as service providers who because of our superior English and lower cost look like havens of cheap work to be done.
In the end all engineering is about maths and physics. The latter borrowing heavily from the former. Mathematical expertise is not new to India. Vedic maths is still a subject for study in more than one international universities. Then why do we struggle to produce wonderful engineers. Computer Engineering is hardly about programming and programming languages.
We have had enough of Implementation tasks....We need to produce now designers, Conceptualizers and Innovators....Time to change is Now...or Never.
