What's the latest tender in line with? Both will co-exist. And extended order of 100+ wouldnt have been given, no addition of another production line wouldnt have happened if it was dead.
Local one is India's own IP, it can do whatever it pleases with that platform. If it wants it's imported LRUs to be replaced by the industry, it can. If it wants to replace the engine, radar, electronics, etc. It can. If it wants to make a naval tech demo off of the platform, it can. None of which you can do with a foreign platform, without red tape.The mark 2 is under development.
However, I still support a foreign OEM tie up with upcoming private sector integrators.
I have very different take on this, IMO this is a strategic decision to create Indian's own LM/Boeing in long run. Government need to give incentive to private sector to invest money in the first instance, and with this, hopefully LM & Tata will set up joint venture only if GOI agreed to give them big enough order to make money on their investment. Some people may think, they are wasting money on an old platform, however, nothing comes cheap in this world and one has to pay price in some form to break the status quo. We should never talk in absolute numbers and think about flow on affect also. No doubt, Americans will make money from this, so would be thousands of people employed due to this decision, so would be small companies making basics nuts and bolts, GOI through taxes, and more importantly Indian economy when people will spend their money. Apologies for being bit obnoxious when explaining this with more granularity, however, I have learned from my time here on PDF, people love taking things in absolute terms.
The thought process as per my logic is, in the beginning Tata will hire lots of American engineers especially in lead capacity, this will create high tech IP in Indian eco-system and will propel Tata to do bigger and better things in 15-20 years time if thinking from conservative angle, and may be in 7-10 years time from optimistic perspective.
Tata being a private company will pay high end money and hopefully some of our brightest stay in India to make it better instead of helping Trump out in making America great again. Look what Tatas are doing at world level in auto and IT sector. Ultimately, they will become too big to fail and GOI has to give them big enough orders to keep people in the jobs. Lets look at US, they are even ready to shove democracy in throat to so many countries in the world just to keep high tech people in LM/Raytheon/Boeing employed.
Russians and French have taught Indians that TOT is myth and no one is going to help with Turbofan and India have to build a desi engine on its own. This will indirectly help them in the longer run, hopefully, in future private sector would be big enough to do innovative things and turbofan would be one of them. If nothing else, it can transfer the production of jets to private sector 100%, and HAL can focus on R&D which IMO should be the case anyway.
To Pakistani posters, me being a Punjabi knows you guys a touch better than others. We are emotional people and emotional people are not strategic thinkers. Lets see the examples here, having a enriched Uranium based nuclear bomb which is a simpler design than plutonium one however bit compromised from size perspective, no twin engine platform as deterrent strategic weapon and in recent past going public with Kulbhushan. These are examples of tactical decisions and nothing wrong but these, however, tactics can only take you that far, and strategic decisions change the courses of history.
Someone wise said, tactics win battles and strategy win wars.
Pakistan has already had F-16's for decades already.
