Are you for a minute saying the Euro fighters promoters are more broke than France ?
Apart of Germany, yes they are more broke, but even Germany is cutting their defence budget and cancelling, or at least trying to sell their last order of 37 EFs to us. The situation in UK is even worse, they will cut the T3B order and want to sell most of the T1s, because they are too expensive to upgrade and operate. Italy already cancelled the T3B and Spain will just follow. UK and ITA will buy F35 instead, Germany reduced their fleet and already starts new developments in the UAV sector, Spain will probably reduce the order and might opt for some F35Bs for their carriers and to replace the F18 Hornets later.
India will be a development partner if it chooses the Euro fighter
No, we will only be a production partner, because there is hardly anything left to develop, or to participate. The TVC for example is developed for nearly a decade now, but no customer wants to pay for the integration, so even if we choose EF and to fund this tech, we will only pay money, not develop anything. The only part that would include real R&D is the Sea Typhoon, that's why they are offering us to lead the development, because we would have a reason to be called a real partner and they benefit from the upgrades we fund like CFTs, TVC, integration of anti ship or cruise missiles...
Remember, the EF partners are only interested in 20% of the upgrades that are offered in MMRCA, while we have to fund the rest if we go for EF and while the Rafale already has this funded and available.
If we have ToT and license to manufacture spares, we are dependent on none. And in war times, if we have the technology, we wont be waiting for a green signal to manufacture spares ourselves.
Ramu, think about it logically! If that would be true and we produce the MKI nearly completelly in India now, why is there an issue about Russian spare supply now? Why are we searching for western suppliers for several of the spares for Russian aircrafts?
ToT allows us to produce lets say the airframe, or the engine of MKI/MMRCA in India, so won't have "much" problems with these things in war times, but still many minor parts of the fighter have to be bought from the supplier country or will only be assembled in India. We will never get 100% ToT of anything, especially not from critical parts and especially not from the US, but the Europeans are more open in this area and that's why we can benefit much from this deal, even if it is not 100% ToT. Btw, we don't produce the weapons of MMRCA fighters in India, so in war times we are dependent on approval of these countries, but even in peace time the negotiations in terms of upgrades will be more difficult when 4 different partners (Austria and S. Arabia are unimportant) have to agree and find a common upgrade solution. The best example for this is the T3A agreement between the 4 partner countries, which was fixed 2 or 3 years ago, but still they didn't find a common agreement of what this upgrade really will include in terms of new capabilities. So far ONLY, Paveway IV LGBs and METEOR missile will be new, while these EFs will be able to add AESA, TVC, CFTs, or more weapons later, if somebody (India) funds the final development/integration.
Last year we heared RAF officials that they expected a decison about integration of Brimstone, or Storm Shadow by early this year, but now with even further cuts and the impressive performance of Tornado and drones in Afghanistan and Libya, they are changing their strategies and wants to keep the Tornado in service as long as possible, since it can use these weapons anyway, while EF takes over the supporting role (escorts + offering additional LGBs), rather than to replace the Tornados with fully capable EFs. At the current situation, it is more likely that they will buy more drones/co-develop the Telemos drone with Dassault and wait for the F35, rather than buying EFs.