If this was possible, why wouldn't they do it earlier? Even such a consortium would end up outsourcing a western design bureu for doing the design and leading the construction (assuming lack of the experience on such platforms was the prime cause for looking a foreign partner).
And if i am not mistaken there were other likely candidates and TAIS has given the best offer, so why not going for other candidates if the TAIS deal ceased due to the political differences.
I kind of answered this before in other threads. To put it shortly, GRSE is the only yard in India with the in-house experience in oilers/supply ships (INS Aditya, 24k tons), but HSL was trying to enter the field to compete, eventhough both are state-owned they are managed by independent boards and have independent budgets, so HSL sought to make up for it's lack of expertise by tying up with international partners.
In the meantime, GRSE had moved their business model more toward main surface combatants (frigates, corvettes) and got no follow-up orders for the oilers. The MoD saw fit to develop a new yard for oilers, LHDs and other such larger vessels and nominated HSL. The rest is history.
That said, there may have been other factors as well (like trying to use the deal to get Turkish government to ease off on Kashmir etc.)
But whatever the reasons, if the article is to be believed, they've moved on to taking a gamble on new companies, but no foreign partner is mentioned, only local ones.
It's possible MoD convinced GRSE to part with its expertise (which I guess would be against shareholder interest), or maybe it was all just a political tool and it failed so the Govt decided to end the charade and move on.
I say that because technically, correct me if I'm wrong, TAIS hasn't actually built any supply vessel of this scale before either (45k+ tons), so they were taking a gamble either way. The only partner that made sense was HHI, but the commercial negotiations didn't work out. The kind of vessels of this type that Turkish yards built/building like the Derya are very similar in scale to what WDB had already designed in the past.
So I felt something was fishy the minute they went to TAIS, instead of the traditional partners in naval projects (Russia or France).
government.economictimes.indiatimes.com
