India Builds the Fighter Jet. It Still Has to Import the Engine.

On the assembly line at Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore sits a fighter jet that is, by almost every measure, Indian. The Tejas Mk1A was designed by Indian engineers, its airframe riveted from Indian parts, its radar and mission computer wired in India. There are roughly thirty of them, built, flown, tested.

They cannot enter service. They are waiting for a crate from Ohio.

Inside the crate is a jet engine — the GE F404, made in the United States — and without it the aircraft is a beautifully finished shell going nowhere. As of early 2026, India had a contract for 99 of these engines and had received a handful. The plane India can build is grounded by the one part it can’t.

Hold that image, because it’s the whole story in miniature. For most of the last two decades India was the single biggest arms buyer on the planet, importing almost everything that flew, floated or fired. Today it builds its own aircraft carrier, its own cruise missile, its own ballistic-missile submarine — and, for the first time in its history, sells weapons abroad in real quantity. The transformation is genuine. The crate on the runway is why it isn’t finished.

From 90 percent imported to a policy that says “no”

Rewind to the early 2010s. India was importing something like 90 percent of its major defence equipment. Fighters came from Russia and France, submarines from Germany and Russia, artillery from wherever it could be bought. A country that had been independent for six decades was, in hardware terms, almost entirely dependent.

The pivot was deliberate and it was industrial policy, not slogan. “Make in India,” launched in 2014, put manufacturing at the centre; “Atmanirbhar Bharat” — roughly, “self-reliant India” — turned it into a defence programme from 2020. The sharpest instrument was the bluntest: the government published positive indigenisation lists, catalogues of equipment that simply could not be imported after a set date. Five such lists now cover more than 5,500 items. If you want that part, the rule says, buy it from an Indian factory or build one.

Money followed the rule. In recent years the Ministry of Defence has earmarked around 65 percent of its capital procurement budget for domestic sourcing. Guaranteeing demand is the oldest trick in industrial development: give a manufacturer a buyer it can count on, and the factory gets built.

The output is measurable. India’s annual defence production crossed ₹1.5 lakh crore (about $18 billion) in FY2024-25 — more than triple the level of a decade earlier. The question was never whether India could assemble things. It’s whether it can design the hard parts. That’s where two acronyms come in.

DRDO and HAL: the engine room of self-reliance

Two state institutions carry most of the weight. DRDO — the Defence Research and Development Organisation — is the sprawling network of labs that designs missiles, radars, torpedoes and the systems inside them. HAL — Hindustan Aeronautics Limited — is the aircraft builder, the company that turns a design into a flying machine on a production line.

Their flagship collaboration is the Tejas, the Light Combat Aircraft: India’s first home-designed fighter to reach squadron service. It is a real aeroplane doing real work, and the order book is serious — 83 Mk1A jets contracted in 2021 for around ₹46,000 crore, and a follow-on for 97 more signed in 2025 worth another ₹62,370 crore. That’s a planned fleet of 180 fighters, built in India.

And yet the Tejas is also the clearest illustration of the gap, because the one thing HAL cannot make is the thing that makes it fly. The engine is American. India designed the jet around a foreign heart, and when GE’s deliveries slipped by more than two years, the whole programme slipped with them. You can build the airframe. Building the engine is a different order of hard — and we’ll come back to why.

The missile that found a buyer

If the Tejas shows the ceiling, the BrahMos shows the reach.

BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile — it flies at nearly three times the speed of sound, low and fast, powered by a ramjet. It is a joint venture, born in the late 1990s between DRDO and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyeniya, with India holding the majority stake (50.5 percent). Two decades on, it is manufactured, upgraded and increasingly localised in India, and it is one of the most capable weapons of its kind in service anywhere.

In 2022 it did something no Indian weapon had done before at this scale: it won a foreign customer. The Philippines signed a $375 million contract for three coastal-defence batteries. The first was delivered in April 2024, flown in aboard a transport aircraft; a second batch went by sea in 2025. For a country that had spent its entire post-independence history as a buyer, the direction of the arrow had reversed. India had become a seller of a frontline missile system.

That single deal has become the emblem of the export push — proof that “Made in India” defence hardware could meet a foreign military’s standards and its cheque.

A carrier, a missile family, a submarine

The heavy-industry end of the story is where the engineering is most visibly Indian.

INS Vikrant, commissioned in September 2022, is the first aircraft carrier ever designed and built in India. It’s a 45,000-tonne warship assembled at Cochin Shipyard, roughly ₹20,000 crore of steel and systems, with the Navy putting indigenous content at about 76 percent — over 550 suppliers and 100-plus small firms feeding one hull. Only a handful of nations can build a carrier at all. India joined the club by building one, not buying one.

Then the missiles. The Agni family is DRDO’s long-range ballistic line, and its most advanced member, Agni-V, reaches beyond 5,000 kilometres. In March 2024, in a test named Mission Divyastra, India flew Agni-V carrying MIRV technology for the first time — multiple independently targetable warheads on a single missile, a genuinely difficult piece of engineering that only a small number of countries have mastered.

And beneath the surface, the Arihant class — India’s nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines. These complete the “nuclear triad,” the ability to launch from land, air and sea. INS Arihant was the first; INS Arighaat, commissioned in 2024, is reported to be about 70 percent indigenous. A nuclear submarine is one of the most complex machines a country can attempt, and India is building them at home.

Add the artillery. The Pinaka rocket system and the ATAGS towed howitzer — both DRDO designs, both built substantially by private Indian companies — have moved from prototype to production, and Pinaka has begun finding export customers abroad. The private sector, long a bystander in Indian defence, now accounts for a large and growing share of what gets built.

The export ledger

Put the numbers on a table and the arc is unmistakable.

In 2013-14, India exported defence goods worth ₹686 crore — a rounding error, essentially nothing. In FY2024-25 the figure was ₹23,622 crore. And in FY2025-26 it hit a record ₹38,424 crore — roughly $4.5 billion — a jump of nearly 63 percent in a single year, per the Ministry of Defence’s own figures released in April 2026.

That’s a fifty-fold rise in a little over a decade. India now ships defence equipment to more than 80 countries, and the number of Indian firms exporting has climbed past 145. Tellingly, private companies now supply nearly half of those exports — this is no longer just state factories moving surplus. The government’s stated target is ₹50,000 crore in exports by 2029, alongside ₹3 lakh crore of domestic production.

It’s a real business now, growing fast, and pointed the right way.

The number that keeps India honest

And here is the fact the story cannot skip, because leaving it out would turn journalism into a brochure.

India is still one of the two largest arms importers on Earth.

According to SIPRI, the Stockholm institute that tracks the global weapons trade, India was the world’s second-largest arms importer over 2020-24, taking about 8.3 percent of all imports — behind only wartime Ukraine, and ahead of every other nation. Its imports did fall by roughly 9 percent versus the previous five years, and its reliance on any single supplier has loosened sharply — Russia’s share of Indian purchases dropped from around 72 percent to 36 percent as France and others moved in. But the top-line fact stands. For all the carriers and missiles, India still buys enormous quantities of weapons abroad.

Why? Circle back to that crate from Ohio.

The single hardest thing in military aviation is the jet engine — the metallurgy of turbine blades that spin white-hot without melting, the “hot section” know-how that a handful of firms guard like a family recipe. India has tried for decades to build its own, through the Kaveri engine programme, and it never quite delivered a powerplant good enough to fly a fighter. So the indigenous Tejas flies on an American engine. The next-generation stealth fighter, the AMCA, is being planned around a foreign engine too — and India’s would-be partners have proven reluctant to hand over the deepest secrets. The engine, more than anything, is the wall self-reliance keeps hitting.

There are others. Advanced semiconductors, certain sensors and seekers, high-end materials — the components that sit at the very top of the technology ladder are still, largely, imported.

The transformation, and the crate

So which is it — triumph or dependence? The honest answer is both, and the tension between them is the actual story.

A generation ago India could build very little of its own arsenal and had to buy the rest. Today it designs and builds aircraft carriers, ballistic-missile submarines, MIRV-capable missiles and a supersonic cruise weapon that foreign militaries now line up to purchase. That is not a cosmetic change. It is deep industrial capability, built over decades, and the export ledger proves the world takes it seriously.

But a country that has to fly its own fighter on someone else’s engine has not finished the job, and India’s own engineers are the first to say so. The distance still to travel isn’t measured in airframes or hulls — India has shown it can make those. It’s measured in the handful of impossibly hard components at the summit of the technology, the ones that separate a nation that assembles advanced weapons from one that can build every part of them alone.

India has climbed most of that mountain. The crate on the runway in Bangalore is a reminder of how much of it is still above.