Sorry-ass...

.....the fuss over the first flight of India's first indigenous aircraft, that is. It's a crying shame that we haven't been able to build a single aircraft in fifty-seven years of Independence. And now that we have built something that looks distinctly archaic, we're going ga-ga about it.

The development of Saras is being linked to the success of Embraer of Brazil. So now we're having aircraft also "inspired" by someone else, huh? After movies and soundtracks, it's now the turn of aircraft? And what, pray, was the realisation? That developing an aircraft to serve a niche segment would prove to be profitable.

Over the years, we Indians have become inured to such drivel that we don't even bother to think that:

• In fifty years, we haven't been able to develop any indigenous defence equipment - apart from some sidearms, perhaps.
• The much-hailed Arjun MBT will be so much scrap metal when it actually comes to combat - if it doesn't sink into the ground or run out of fuel before that.
• We don't have any fighter aircraft that we can be proud of - the ALH and LCA have all been developed after dollops of foreign help; the "totally indigenous" Kaveri engine was so much money down the drain.

The plain and simple reason for this is our overreaching greed. We cannot open the defence sector to private players because of the fear that substandard defence products will compromise our defence - because the private sector is full of scheming capitalists who will suck the country dry.

Therefore, we persist in letting behemoths like the DRDO spend copious amounts of the taxpayer's money in developing something that is outdated before it is even prototyped. To ensure that our public sector remains equally corrupt and inefficient, we pay our scientists measly amounts, treat them like dirt and let monkeys like this decide their fate, making the scientists automatically prone to the lust for lucre.