True, no one denies that. I hope private consortium give them run for their money; but the usual rhetoric that PSU will close down in 5 years, and it's end of days for DPSU's is quite simplistic and far fetched. On a lighter note; If a scrawny little Amir Khan of QSQT can become the buff khan from Dangal, I am sure with the right measures DPSU's can shape up too.
Most DPSU's if anything are goldmines for it's largest shareholder i.e. "The President of India"; trust me that entity is not going down without a fight. With right recruitment and mountains of cash it sits on, their business model was built for the last 5 decades for this exact scenario, to cope up with globalization pressures; with op cost out of the way, and DRDO to be the research innovators, DPSU's jobs should become easy; i.e if DRDO labs can do it's job correctly.
Lets say ARDE can design a fabulous new age rifle system to OFB, I doubt there is an entity in the world that can produce the system cheaper than OFB; it will beat the snot out of a Sig or a colt, where they have to eat the price of development, promotions, testing and sales; while for OFB here we have a 2 million rifle book order, confirmed customer, zero promotion cost, zero development cost, and zero op cost, zero debt, zero interest cost, low labor cost. There is no beating this system in the open market; as long as ARDE can design and deliver a world class system.
But if ARDE delivers a turd like minsas, excalibur, JVPC etc; there will be no buyer for the system; even if ofb sells it for $100; that remains the problem. In US you have saturday night special junk guns that sell for 75 bucks; but a $600 sig or glock will outsell these by millions. The main hurdle for DPSU's remains Project management, research management; and all entities down stream suffer with snowball effect due to their own contribution to the endemic mismanagement.
A poor design package and mismanaged project from ADA causes delays in order book and IAF acceptance, this goes down stream to HAL, in turn poor staffing and planning in HAL results in poor delivery schedule in to IAF, then IAF's poor managment of the program and feedback result in poor upgrade specifications to DRDO, that results in newer team mismanaging the new versions, and the cycle continues.
If one entity does its job professionally, and the other doesn't; issues can be pinpointed and rectified, when the problems are in all stages, there needs to restructuring based on successful models which are available all around us. DPSU's need to be reformed, not shut down. Shutting down public owned debt free giants by any political dispensation to unilaterally favor private business houses would be daylight robbery of public money.
