The third Tejas Mk1A squadron stood up at Naliya on Friday — sixteen aircraft, delivered inside the year, on a line now running ahead of its own contract incentives. The programme that spent two decades as a cautionary tale is becoming the Atmanirbhar argument's exhibit one.
The week's quieter first: a Southeast Asian air force submitted a formal briefing request on the Mk1A — the programme's first structured export inquiry. The ₹30,000-crore export book has been built on missiles and radars; a fighter would change its species.
The export logic follows the delivery logic: air forces buy production lines, not prototypes, and three squadrons in under two years is the demonstration no brochure replaces. The Mk2's December first flight — with its supply chain contracted in advance — extends the same pitch upmarket.
The war-quarter audit's lesson holds here too: the emergency orders that surged this line created the spare capacity export contracts now court. Procurement as industrial policy, compounding.
Squadron arithmetic: 32 against the sanctioned 42, with the Jaguar clock still running. The gap remains real; for the first time in a generation, so does the closing speed. More on our defence desk.
