Guns vs Butter-4: We took giant leap with the Tejas, says Indian Air Force

In the fourth of a five-part series, the IAF assures the Standing Committee on Defence that its fighter fleet is not too diverse and each fighter has its use

As is the case with the Army and the Navy, the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) Budget allocations for the Financial Year 2022-23 (FY23) are significantly lower than its projections, according to the 36th Report of the 17th Lok Sabha’s Standing Committee on Defence.

In five of the last six years, the IAF’s revenue allocations were 20-42 per cent less than what it projected as demands for those years. 

The situation is even bleaker for the IAF’s capital allocations, in which the IAF received 40-67 per cent less than its projected figure. While the defence ministry expects that the IAF’s order for 123 Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA) will galvanise the indigenous aerospace manufacturing eco-system, the Standing Committee on Defence asked the IAF if it was comfortable with inducting so many varieties of fighters. The report quotes an IAF officer as responding, “In every air force, we will have a mix of all types of aircraft because every aircraft has a certain role. You cannot have all aircraft of one class. As far as LCA is concerned, it does fit in. We have to remember that it was designed as a replacement for MIG-21. The aircraft has come up quite well. It is meeting those requirements quite well. Yes, if you ask, everybody would like to have an all-fifth generation aircraft. But we have to see what we can get, what is available in the market.”

The IAF officer also said there was a need to give a fillip to India’s aerospace industry. 

“We also have to see what will happen tomorrow. If we keep buying (fighter aircraft) from the open market, we will never become self-reliant. So, we need to give a push to our own industry. We need to hold their hands and the IAF is committed towards that. We will make a happy mix and that is why we are going in for a MRFA (multi-role fighter aircraft) contract for 114 aircraft,” said the IAF officer.

On the LCA project delays, an IAF representative told the Standing Committee, “The last (fighter) aircraft that we designed was the Marut (in the 1950s). So, after a gap of over 30 years, we are trying to make a fighter aircraft in-house. We took a giant leap. LCA is a generation four-plus aircraft. We could have gone for a third- generation aircraft with the conventional controls and with rudimentary dials and old avionics but we had to catch up with (global) technology. It was a very good step, though we have taken longer than we should have.”

“We were learning our lessons. We cannot call them failures but there are a lot of roadblocks. Then, the sanctions came in after our nuclear test (in 1998). That caused a lot of drawbacks. That is where we started thinking that we should have most of the technologies in-house,” the IAF pilot said.

“But the fly-by-wire system of that aircraft and the entire control laws have been written by Indians in-house. In the avionics, the entire architecture is Indian, and it has been revised once fully. That means what we conceived in the beginning and what we are flying today are two different architectures,” the pilot added.

The Standing Committee sought an explanation on the sharp decline in this year’s BE projection, compared to the previous year.

“Our projection last year was Rs 85,000 crore and we got an allocation of Rs 57,000 crore, which we consumed. This year, the projection has been less because of the Russia-Ukraine war,” the officer said.