As flawed as Tejas is, at least the situation is improving. Mk1A is a big jump in capabilities and the ramp is beginning. This time you can´t blame India since the US was responsible for the engine delays. Can it compare to the best J-10 version? Obviously not, but India has no choice but continue on this path.
People here constantly compare with China but perhaps China is the outlier? I just looked at Indonesia's airforce data today. We are talking about a country of nearly 300 million people, richer than India on a per capita basis, and yet they have no indigenous jet whatsoever. They just buy a bunch of off-the-shelf jets from whoever.
Brazil and Nigeria are both big population countries. So is Pakistan. The JF-17 would have been impossible without China. So it seems like the pattern is that very large developing countries don't have the industrial base or the political patience to carry through these types of projects. Tejas, as flawed as it is, nevertheless is getting more funding with better variants slowly coming out.
So while what happened in the Chinese air industry was very impressive, I am not certain China is a good example because it is such a huge positive outlier. Even at very poor income levels, the Chinese aerospace industry was doing better decades ago than many far richer big countries today. If you look at more countries than just China, then we can say that India is doing better than most. Part of that is the huge population, but I think in general people here seem to underestimate how much of an outlier China is. And I don´t think it is a good comparison for the Tejas. Most big developing countries have absolutely zero indigenious jet fighters. Full self-sufficiency like China is incredibly rare. We shouldn't forget it.
