I'd like to differ on the DPSU+Private player here. When you bring in PSU, you are bringing in public tax money and CAG along with. The moment they are in, there is bound to be unwanted audit and parliamentary discussion resulting in the same old mess we are in as of now.
DPSU involvement should be upto the extent of providing their manufacturing and testing facility to bring down the development cost.
Yes. Bhargavastra do fall under that category. IA has not yet put forward any requirement for such a system. But EEL has taken the initiative in this regard. So basically its one of a kind system out there and they are infact creating demand for this instead of waiting for IA to come up and ask for such a system.
my 2 paisa speculative gyan on this..
in that case a good starting point theoretically would be, an academic forum.
- pick a university, perhaps Rashtriya Raksha university
- create a permanent forum within the university, like a shark tank for defence tech , people can come from all over the country and pitch their ideas in a single place, with an entry criteria (not free for all).
- also create a few academic courses in the same university, to bridge the knowledge gap between tech and tactics, so that kids are not giving presentations on star wars when the need of the hour is portable gensets on the field.
and then there is the soft power issue, as we can see here itself in DFI, since the online content of foreign militaries and wars outnumber content on Indian defence and wars by atleast 1000:1, the majority of solutions are influenced foreign militaries, discourse and wars.
and on top of this, folks who are defence enthusiasts, meaning they know a bit more about more than regular public, majority of their initial years often start with being harsha bhogle of defence personified i.e gormint don't know what it is doing, security forces don't know what they are doing , i know everything.
having said this, success rate will be very low for defence. cost of finance and doing manufacturing is still high in this country at the moment.
on the bright side, new initiatives of hackathons and IDES seems to be working well.
