IAF chief pushes for indigenous defence manufacturing

Air Force chief also said that there is a need for manufacturing at least 35-40 military aircraft in India every year and stressed the target is not impossible to meet

New Delhi: Pitching for developing indigenous capabilities for defence manufacturing, Air Chief Marshal AP Singh on Friday said the Indian Air Force would prefer a “homegrown” system even if it gives “slightly lesser performance”.

Speaking at the Chanakya Dialogues conclave here on the theme of “Bharat 2047: Atmanirbhar In War”, the Air Force chief also said that there is a need for manufacturing at least 35-40 military aircraft in India every year and stressed the target is not impossible to meet.

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He said the IAF’s first priority when it comes to acquisition, is “anything that is homegrown”.

“So I’m very convinced in my mind that even if a homegrown system gives me a slightly lesser performance… if it is 90 percent or 85 percent of what I get in the world market, we will go for homegrown system because that is the only way we can get over with always looking outward to get our systems,” he said.

“But at the same time, a homegrown system cannot just happen overnight. It will take time and it needs to be supported. So for that, Indian Air Force is fully committed to any R&D project,” he said.

He said India needs to develop capability to produce at least 35-40 fighter aircraft every year to meet the requirements of replacing aging fleets.

“So those capacities, I understand, cannot come up overnight. But we need to start pushing ourselves towards that. Now like the LCA Mk1A production, HAL has promised that from next year onwards, we will have 24 aircraft being made per year… plus some Sukhoi or some other aircraft… we are looking at numbers like 30 per year possible by HAL alone,” he said.

“If some private industry comes in for a make in India, let’s say, we add another maybe 12-18 aircraft per year from their side. So we are reaching that number. So that is possible,” he said.

He also stressed on the importance of domestic defence equipment to fight long wars.

“We need to be able to take on this long protracted war, for which we need the capacity to be able to come up with a production rate that will be required for the weapons during war,” the IAF chief said.

He said in case of a long war, India will have to rely on a mix of what is there in store, and having a confidence that industry can produce weapons required.

Talking about technologies like AI, he said the IAF is moving very fast with automation.

“I think we all understand what is happening in the world with the technologies that have been talked about — AI, quantum computing and automation is what is going on. So we are working towards positively, we are already moving very fast with automation,” he said.

“A lot of systems have been automated. A lot of prognosis has been automated. A lot of automation has taken place there, which is saving us a lot of time and also giving us efficient solutions,” he added.