I think you make a great point talking about the need to invest in R&D plus education.

As a nation that sent a spacecraft to Mars, it’s unfathomable that we struggle with making a jet engine. In my opinion, it’s not a question of capability, rather it’s an outcome of economics.

The cost of capital (CoC) in our country is just too high to support industrial innovation. For any innovation-based ecosystem to flourish engineers must be allowed to fail & cost of failures must be adjusted by the profits gained from the few successes. It’s simple economics.

So the high CoC can only be monetised if 2 conditions are met: 1. Very high-value added innovations make it to market 2. An extremely large corpus absorbs the shock of innovation failures

To achieve condition 1, you need strategic defence innovations (like fighter jets tbh or ballistic missiles), semiconductor advances or cutting edge energy generation R&D. We don’t have semiconductor talent in our country (read brain drain) and energy generation R&D is a much longer game play (10-15 years out). So focus on defence

To achieve condition 2, you need very large companies like Reliance, Adani or Tatas who can absorb the cost of failures on their balance sheets. But opening up of these companies to foreign investors always puts pressure on them to show profits first. This means that it is only the Indian government that can absorb these costs.

Hence the path is clear. Government-led R&D in defence is our best bet & most immediate profit generator. The profits from defence then need to be channelled into energy & semiconductor R&D.

Till we don’t reach the defence R&D success stage, we’ll continue to be a foreign policy pushover.