Its a light combat aircraft could get India a seat in defence exporters' high table
INDIA HAS TAKEN its first baby steps to create history in the world of defence exports. For the first time ever, India took its indigenously-build Light combat aircraft (LCA) to the Bahrain air show in the fourth week of January 2015, much to the glee of Indian aviation enthusiasts.
This is the first definitive bid by India to showcase its home-built combat plane to the global military aviation market at an airshow abroad. The plane has flown at the biennial AeroIndia air show at Yelahanka in Bengaluru in the past few editions.
At the Shakhir air base in Bahrain, the Indian aircraft went unchallenged. But more on that later.
LCA, or Tejas, as it is fondly called, is getting ready for full-scale production by 2017. This comes at a time when there has been a lot of interest generated in Asia in the Tejas as a possible Indian offer for exports.
The Indian export dreams for Tejas has been spurred by the recent decision of the Indian Air Force to induct 120 Tejas fighters into its combat fleet at the earliest in its presently available version, code-named as LCA-1A, and allowing the Indian Aeronautical Development Agency to simultaneously work on a much improved version of the plane, to be called LCA-2, for later inductions.
The Air Force move, to finally induct Tejas by 2018, is a pragmatic one, and allows the force to use what is presently available from the Indian defence R&D establishment and to help keep the production line set up at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited rolling for a while before the LCA-2 gets ready for production.
The production targets for LCA continue to remain eight a year initially, which will be jacked up to 16 a year at the peak of its serial production. At this rate, HAL would take close to a decade to even complete delivery of the first 120 LCA-1A variant of the plane ordered by the Air Force.
It is in this background that India has taken the LCA to Bahrain. But India’s LCA has a South Asian competitor. Pakistan’s JF-17, called “Thunder”, and built with Chinese help, has been in its Air Force service since 2010, and the country has taken the plane to international airshows for the past couple of years now.
After doing the rounds of some airshows, both in Asia and Europe, Pakistan has begun talking of exporting the JF-17 to some Asian nations. The countries that were bandied about for JF-17 exports were Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Malaysia. But all the three nations have denied they had interest in JF17, which essentially is a third generation fighter modeled on the Soviet-era MiG-21 supersonic combat jet technology.
At Shakhir air base, a contest of sorts between Tejas and Thunder was anticipated by aviation enthusiasts ahead of the air show. But that turned out to be a dud after Pakistan pulled out the Thunder from the flight and static display.
Indian Air Force pilots, who have had the opportunity to fly the Tejas, vouch for it. Some have even claimed that Tejas, a fourthgeneration plus fighter, would beat JF-17 hands down in a one-on-one dog fight in the air. But that sort of a contest can happen only during war time. A joint air force exercise to test each other’s aircraft is next to impossible, even on foreign air space.
If Thunder had participated in Bahrain air show, it would have competed with Tejas for the first time to grab the global aviation enthusiasts’ attention. But that was not to be.
While we await the contest between Tejas and Thunder at the next international air show, (may be at the Singapore air show in February), the talk of Sri Lanka being interested in Tejas as an import option, too, has got reported in the island nation. No official word on that “interest” from India’s neighbour has come yet. The inherent message from India through its Tejas offer, even if it is just a media report, shows the kind of reach New Delhi still has with Colombo.
What’s in store for India if the talk about Tejas being available for exports turns into a real deal? That sale would enable manifold growth of India’s defence exports.
In 2014-15, India had done only about $150 million in defence exports and these included the supply of Sukhoi combat plane parts, warships, military helicopters, sonars and radars to nations that are considered friends by New Delhi, according to data presented to Indian Parliament in 2015.
Some analysts note that the defence export from India is expected to grow by 50 per cent — to at least about $225 million in the current fiscal ending March 2016.
But the exponential growth in defence exports, as envisaged by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, to touch $1 billion by 2017-18, seems like a far off dream. But this dream could get the much-needed wings and the lift if India is able to convince one of its closest neighbours (Sri Lanka, may be) to buy the LCA. ]
This will not only spur growth in the defence exports figures, but also ensure that the LCA project achieves economies of scale. It would be an understatement to say that this would energise the aviation manufacturing ecosystem in the country.
India has maintained its status as the world’s largest arms importer for nearly halfa-decade, according to the Stockholm-based SIPRI’s annual data. The latest SIRPI data was released in March 2015, and that showed India had garnered about 15 per cent of the entire global defence exports in the 2010-14 period.
India’s imports were still largely (70 per cent) met by Russia. US and Israel met another 12 per cent and seven per cent Indian defence imports, respectively.
China, on the other hand, had reduced its imports to drop in the largest importers table to the third position. Beijing has achieved this within the five-year period. No one would now believe that China was, until 2010, the world’s largest importer of arms, with Russia covering about 61 per cent of its imports even today.
Again, India was not among the top ten defence exporters of the world, and this list was led, obviously, by the US, with 31 per cent of the global arms exports in the same five-year period. Russia was a close second with 27 per cent.
What came as a surprise was China growing to the third position in the defence exports table, spurred by the five per cent export business it did since 2010. China’s largest customer was Pakistan, which got 41 per cent of Beijing’s defence products. Bangladesh and Myanmar got 16 per cent, and 12 per cent, respectively.
The Narendra Modi government’s focus on Make in India is likely to be a game-changer in bringing the nation of 1.2 billion people out of the ignominy of being the world’s top importer of arms. That is, if the Make in India initiative is implemented well. The defence sector is going to be the one powering this initiative. That’s where lies the promise of India growing in the world defence exporters table and occupying a respectable seat there at the top.