An unfinished mission

India's aeroengine ambitions are at an inflexion point

11 min read

Updated On: Aug 12 2026 | 12:03 PM IST

“We should build our own jet engines too. Our scientists and youth must take this up as a direct challenge,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his Independence Day address last year.

In that remark, he identified one of the most critical gaps in India’s defence manufacturing capability: The country does not build the very heart of the combat aircraft it seeks to produce. The scale of the challenge is evident from the experience of China, the most recent entrant to a club that includes the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), France and Russia — countries that mastered jet engine technology decades ago.

In addition to committing enormous financial and human resources, the Chinese government also turned to less benign methods in its pursuit of reliable jet engines — a capability it achieved only in the latter part of the previous decade.

That effort was laid bare in November 2022, when Yanjun Xu, the first Chinese intelligence officer ever extradited to the US to stand trial, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Xu had sought to steal advanced US aircraft engine technology from GE Aviation, one of the four companies that dominate the global aeroengine market, for the benefit of the Chinese state.

This was not an isolated case. In 2018, the US Department of Justice accused Chinese intelligence officers of conspiring to steal data related to a turbofan engine being jointly developed by a French aerospace manufacturer and a US-based company for commercial airliners. Such technology is often dual-use. China’s reasons for pursuing

it so relentlessly are reflected in several Chinese publications, which have described aeroengines as the “strategic guarantor” of national security and the “pearl in the crown” of an aviation industry.

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“The engine is the most complex part of any aircraft. Aircraft are designed around the engine, which plays a major role in determining their basic attributes, from how fast and far they fly to how quickly they turn,” Air Marshal Narmdeshwar Tiwari (retired), who was vice chief of the air staff of the Indian Air Force (IAF) during Operation Sindoor, said.

The four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May last year once again underscored the need to develop indigenous aeroengines. During a background briefing on the operation, one of the key lessons identified was that IAF aircraft must be able to seamlessly share a common picture of the battlespace. In the long run, that objective can be fully realised only with platforms that use Indian communications equipment, which imported aircraft cannot easily accommodate.

India’s decades-long experience with aerospace programmes has also shown that fielding a substantial number of indigenous aircraft is not possible without indigenous engines. Yet the country remains entirely dependent on foreign sources — the US, Russia and France — for engines that power both its imported and homegrown aircraft.

The gap, long recognised within India’s defence establishment, has now been thrust into the national spotlight by Modi himself. The challenge has acquired renewed urgency as the country pursues its most ambitious combat aircraft programme so far — the stealthy fifth-generation advanced medium combat aircraft (Amca).

This is not the first time India has attempted to develop its own aeroengine. An earlier effort under the Kaveri programme fell short of its targets, leaving the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft — India’s only indigenous fighter currently in service — dependent on power plants from an increasingly unpredictable US.

Leaving the aeroengine self-sufficiency mission unfinished has cost India time and money. The allocation for aircraft and aeroengines remained above 30 per cent of the defence services’ capital outlay between 2024-25 (FY25) and FY27.

Given that engines account for 20-25 per cent of an aircraft’s cost, their share is likely to be substantial.

To address this deficiency, the government is officially considering the development of a next-generation engine, in collaboration with a foreign partner, to power the Amca. India, therefore, stands at an inflexion point, where the lessons of the past and the constraints of the present converge. The question is whether it can make the right decisions at the right time, address the critical gaps that stifled the Kaveri programme, and apply the lessons from another ambitious military development programme of previous decades.

The right time

“The time is ripe to pursue the co-development of an advanced aeroengine for Amca with a trusted foreign partner. Success would enable India to develop an entire family of power plants for a wide range of applications,” Samir V Kamat, who retired at the end of May as secretary, Department of Defence Research and Development (DDR&D), Ministry of Defence (MoD), and chairman of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), told the Blueprint.

He was referring to the DRDO’s proposed programme to jointly develop a 120-kilonewton (kN) advanced military aeroengine with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) from a friendly foreign country.

France’s Safran is understood to be the OEM with which the Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE), the DRDO laboratory responsible for designing and developing military aircraft engines, would partner on the programme.

The proposal is already before the Cabinet Committee on Security, chaired by the Prime Minister, for final approval, with the programme’s formal commencement now hinging on it.

Email queries sent to the office of the defence secretary, who also holds additional charge as DDR&D secretary and DRDO chairman, on the current status of the programme had not elicited a response at the time of publication. Queries sent to Safran on the status of its participation in the programme also remained unanswered.

Another similar path is also understood to be under examination. Sashi Mukundan, executive vice-president — Transformation at Rolls-Royce India, responding to emailed queries, said the company, with the full backing of the UK Government, has made an offer to the Government of India to develop an engine for the Amca. “The intent is to fast-track the development of a fifth-generation aeroengine, ready for ground testing by 2032 and first flight by 2034, subject to the programme being finalised by the end of this year,” he said, adding that, as part of the offer, the company’s vision is to establish an aerospace gas turbine complex with an Indian partner, with the Amca engine as the anchor programme.

Rolls-Royce’s offer “includes full transfer of technology and ownership of foreground IP [intellectual property] developed in India, with access to decades of background IP for engineering and design activities,” Mukundan said. He added that, overall, the core capabilities, once developed, could also support naval and autonomous platform propulsion.

“Once formally cleared, the programme will take at least 10-12 years to complete development, which is the global norm, with production beginning after that,” a former senior defence official familiar with the proposed engine programme told the Blueprint. Time is of the essence, with Amca series production expected to begin in or after 2035.

He said the projected timeline envisaged the first engine prototype being produced about five years after the programme is launched, followed by six or seven more prototypes before testing is completed. “The engine is improved after each round of testing. That explains the projected number of prototypes and the associated timeline.”

The new engine will be central to the Amca’s success and is intended to power the aircraft’s second tranche. The first batch will be equipped with an advanced 98-kN variant of the US-made GE F414 engine. The new 120-kN engine will generate greater thrust. This will allow the aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound using normal engine power, without injecting additional fuel into the hot exhaust stream through a system known as an afterburner.

This capability, known as supercruise, avoids the main drawback of afterburners, which can consume a fighter’s fuel in a matter of minutes. Aircraft capable of supercruise also produce a much smaller thermal signature than those relying on afterburners, making them significantly harder for adversary sensors to detect. Together, these advantages make supercruise a defining capability of stealthy fifth-generation aircraft — the world’s most advanced combat jets.

Such capabilities do not come cheap. In January 2025, when he was still DRDO chairman, Samir V Kamat had said developing an engine capable of powering a fifth-generation fighter would require investments of up to Rs 50,000 crore (about $5.18 billion) spread over several years.

By comparison, the government has estimated the overall cost of building India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant, at close to Rs 20,000 crore (about $2.07 billion).

The more than two-fold difference might appear striking, given that an aircraft carrier — a highly visible symbol of national power — dwarfs any aero engine ever built. Vikrant, for instance, is about 260 metres long and has a displacement of nearly 45,000 tonnes. Fighter aircraft engines, by contrast, typically weigh 0.9-1.8 tonnes and measure 4-6 metres in length.

The projected cost of the new engine is, however, broadly in line with global norms. It is comparable with the estimated $7.3 billion development cost of the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine that powers the US F-35 stealth fighter.

There are indications that mastering aeroengine technology could cost much more. According to an expert opinion published by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF), China invested $23.7 billion in developing advanced jet engines between 2010 and 2015. By the end of 2020, total investment in China’s “Two Engines” project had risen to nearly $42 billion, against an original budget of about $15 billion. The project, officially launched in August 2016, is aimed at mastering aeroengine and broader gas-turbine technology.

Despite the cost escalation, China appears to have gained from the investment. The ORF piece noted that the country’s “mastery” of jet-engine technology, after decades of failure, is “now fuelling the PLA’s air combat capabilities”.

While the Chinese programme has already produced a number of military engines across different thrust classes and helped narrow the capability gap with Western counterparts, foreign assessments continue to indicate that reliability issues remain.

“Above all else, a military aeroengine must be reliable. That is the principal challenge, apart from achieving the required thrust at a given engine weight — what we call the thrust-to-weight ratio. A pilot can still fly an aircraft that has lost its sensors or navigation systems, but the engine is what keeps both the pilot and the aircraft in the air,” Air Marshal Tiwari (retired) said.

These attributes are broadly determined by four factors: The technology of the engine core — its heart — comprising the compressor, combustor and turbine, which together generate power; the high-grade materials and alloys used to build it; the design and quality of critical components like turbine blades; and the broader design and manufacturing processes.

“Success across all these aspects is crucial to any engine-development programme, but they become even more important — and more challenging — for the 120-kN engine. It represents a generational leap in terms of engine core, design and materials compared with India’s previous efforts, and will be on a par with engines powering today’s fifth-generation aircraft in terms of thrust-to-weight ratio,” the former defence official said.

He said the new engine would need to achieve a thrust-to-weight ratio of more than 10:1, with 11:1 likely to be the target for optimal performance. By comparison, the GE F414 variants that will power the initial Amca aircraft are in the 9:1 thrust-to-weight ratio class.

Against this backdrop, the former official said partnering with a foreign OEM was intended to reduce the risks inherent in the new engine programme. “India does possess the technologies that will go into the new engine, such as single-crystal blades — components made from superalloys that can withstand extremely high temperatures and are manufactured by only a handful of countries, including the US, the UK, France and Russia. But these technologies exist largely at the laboratory level. The selected OEM will bring the manufacturing expertise.”

“One of the most challenging aspects of engine development is the testing regime, and the selected OEM will come with substantial testing data. Moreover, its software tools will already have been trained on thousands of hours of such data,” he said.

The programme, however, is designed to ensure that the engine emerges from genuine joint development, with India acquiring the intellectual property (IP) rights as well as both “knowhow” (the practical manufacturing capability) and “know-why” (the underlying scientific and design principles) of engine development.

“The programme has been designed with the clear goal of serving as a stepping stone towards self-reliance in engine development, which will remain the DRDO’s primary focus area for the foreseeable future,” Kamat said.

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First Published: Aug 12 2026 | 12:02 PM IST

In this article : Aerospace and Defence policy aerospace