You didn't get the point at all. A stable job opportunity does not mean a job in any one organization. It means general employability because the industry across the board is significant. For instance, to be a software engineer is/was considered to be a stable job opportunity.
This is what parents look at, when they groom their children to follow specific careers. Social perception also matters. Obviously, this means the industry has to be scaled up, from the current handful of state owned firms, and a few pvt players and then the SMEs.
Similarly, if to be an mechanical engineer in (say) aircraft development or being an aeronautical engineer, is widely recognized as a good pedigree, then it will automatically translate to many generations of aeronautical engineers graduating and causing a corresponding growth in the supply side as well. Not all will be the best quality, but the pipeline will increase to the point that many good engineers will be available and generally the talent pool for a wide variety of tasks of differing complexities will also be available.
In India, changes happen so rapidly, that blink and you miss them. In other words, accessing the talent pool for a MIC is not as hard as it may seem. Grooming them and developing them will require a significant scale up though in terms of industry structure and programs.
Next:
The DPSUs offer the most "stable" jobs in India, limited only by the last rupee of the poor Indian taxpayer and have never been held accountable for performance, quality or productivity lapses in spite of having arguably the most embarrassing record of any MIC in the world. They have caused wide derision inside and outside the country and in some quarters, complete disbelief at India's almost total ineptness in developing and making weapons.
First, lets focus on whats required.
This derision in whichever quarters it may be, is pointless. Many of those same quarters were tomtomming their own superiority and mocking the IAF for its attrition till Cope India came about and proved to be a wake up call. Similarly, mocking the IA over its J&K tactics was all well and good, till the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq showed these experts what COIN was about.
In other words, judging one's success or inability by what others say is not a good yardstick.
What matters to India is whether the DPSUs fulfill the mandate accorded to them, and do so efficiently. That is a metric to judge them by.
In this, the reality is that the DPSUs (OFB, BEL, HAL, BDL) are basically production shops run on TOT and with limited R&D (slowly changing over the past five odd years).
They are hobbled both by GOI enforced conditions - unionization and restrictive employment policies, limited payscales and also the environment in which they operate, which, to my mind, is deliberately engineered to ensure under-performance.
Keeping the services and the DPSUs at loggerheads also works to the advantage of folks who are wary of either side getting too powerful for their boots. The basic fact of the matter is that the strategic culture of "modern" Nehruvian India is confused, muddled and driven by ideological idiots who occupy positions of far reaching influence and hence undermine the efforts of the others who seek to put a consistent framework in place.
Fact of the matter is that if the DPSUs all started their own R&D programs en masse, and the GOI changed conditions both within the DPSU and outside, so that the services worked with them in an organized fashion, a long term import substitution plan was drawn up and so forth... the import gravy train would cease.
And that has ramifications for many groups who have grown used to eating off that money and using it to cement their supremacy. The DPSUs in that sense of the word are patsies and hence don't rock the boat beyond a point. The case of the ex? BEML Director and how he got to that post is a case in point.
The workforce is also heavily unionized and what happened in GRSE in the 90s is also a case in point.
Blaming the DPSUs for the poor Indian taxpayer is a bit of a joke, no offence intended, because the issue is far more serious, it is the poor Indian taxpayer who elects the kind of political animals that break/subvert every Indian institution to fulfill their agendas, whether it be using state owned assets for personal wealth or using national security as a channel for something else. One gets what one elects, and in this the culpability of the Indian citizen should not be excused.
