The Cabinet has approved procurement of 73 LCA Tejas Mk-1A fighter aircraft and 10 LCA Tejas Mk-1 Trainer aircraft at the cost of Rs45,696cr along with Design and Development of Infrastructure sanctions worth Rs1,202cr. The Centre stated that the procurement of these aircrafts will be from
Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) for IAF.
According to the Defence Ministry, the Light Combat Aircraft Mk-1A variant is an indigenously designed, developed and manufactured state-of-the-art modern 4+ generation fighter aircraft. This aircraft is equipped with critical operational capabilities of Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar, Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Missile, Electronic Warfare (EW) Suite and Air to Air Refuelling (AAR) would be a potent platform to meet the operational requirements of Indian Air Force, IAF.
The ministry highlighted that it is the first “Buy (Indian-Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured)” category procurement of combat aircraft with an indigenous content of 50% which will progressively reach 60% by the end of the programme.
Also, the Cabinet approved infrastructure development by IAF under the project to enable them to handle repairs or servicing at their base depot so that the turnaround time would get reduced for mission-critical systems and would lead to the increased availability of aircraft for operational exploitation. This would enable IAF to sustain the fleet more efficiently and effectively due to the availability of repair infrastructure at respective bases.
The manufacturing of Light Combat Aircraft by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, HAL will give a further push to Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative and boost indigenisation of defence production and the defence industry in the country, the ministry said.
About 500 Indian companies including MSMEs in the design and manufacturing sectors will be working with HAL in this procurement.