As usual RST continues in the same vein of assembling all the facts , drawing the wrong conclusions much like
@BlackOpsIndia then pursuing a faulty line of argument. I recall RST raising Freedom House Index in one of his arguments with Paddy only to have Paddy analyse his post in one of those rare instances & then beat up RST black & blue . It's the same out here.
IN has always wanted to indigenize mfg SSK. It started out with HDW of which we were to mfg 6 but thanks to the corruption scandal which ensued the program ended up yielding 4 submarines of which 2 were built here & the program was effectively buried & with it all the technologies we imbibed as well as the capabilities we created.
As I remarked before highly skilled welders along with other personnel including engineers trained in what was then HDW West Germany migrated to Australia helping them build the Collins class of submarines once the program here shut down . That's the extent of what we lost out on back then .
Then came the 30 year old plan in 1999 which envisaged building ~ 24 odd submarines of which 6 (+3) were to be with a displacement of ~ 1500 Tons +/- 200-300 Tons for littoral defence duties with secondary attack role followed by 6 x ~ 3000 Tons for deep sea patrolling right upto the Persian Gulf , the Malacca Straits , the Bab el Mandeb choke points & the Northern Indian Ocean for which we were to get into a ToT with a foreign OEM.
Long story short that culminated in a deal with Naval Group ( NG) for Scorpenes whereas the Project 75 I which was an equally important part of the matrix for us to master design & development of our indigenous class of submarines was indefinitely postponed. In between all this the Arihant program gathered steam & with it our WDB gained plenty of experience along with the Scorpene program.
Post Scorpenes it was only a matter of time before we announced the launching of our own indigenous program of designing & mfg our own SSKs. However , the IN never lost sight of their long term goals & persisted with the Project 75 I & here we are .
What remains to be seen is how are the IN & MoD going to juggle all these submarine projects in terms of finances & design leave alone mfg which I think we can manage in the next 10 years for we're talking multiple projects here - from the extension of the 3 nos Scorpene under Project 75 to the Project 75 I to the Project 75 Alpha now reduced to 2 nos of the 6 in addition to the Arihant class & the S-5 class on the drawing board , the latter two though executed by the IN & WDB will be under the SFC for obvious reasons with funding under the SFC head.
If anybody thinks we're going to see any movement on Project 76 before the end of this decade I'd be very surprised.
