Even though the Government of India’s capital expenditure on defence has grown at twice the rate of overall Government spending over the past five years, in some areas, India’s preparedness still appears to be inadequate. As Snehesh Alex Philip describes in this article, with the MiG-21, India’s first supersonic fighter, now retired after 62 years of service, “IAF’s fighter jet squadron strength reduced to 29 in effect, lowest level since the 1960s.”
The bad news isn’t that 870 MiG-21s have now been taken out of service. The bad news is that even though all the way back in 1983 that India decided to build a light combat aircraft to replace the MiG-21s, to this day the replace is not ready! As a result the MiG-21s were made to fly longer than they should have and that in turn resulted in our fighter pilots paying the ultimate price:
“The MiG-21s continued to fly, being stretched beyond they should ideally have been, ending up with the moniker—the flying coffin—a disservice to the fighter that saw action in all conflicts fought by India, including the Balakot attack period in 2019.
But now the MiG is gone, leaving the IAF in a very tight spot. While on paper the squadron strength may remain 31, the fact is that for all practical purposes, the strength is down to 29….
Sources said that by 2030, fighters like the MiG-29, Jaguar and Mirages will start getting phased out slowly.
“All of this depends on the timely delivery of the Tejas Mk1A and Tejas Mk2. We don’t want a repeat of the MiG-21 situation where we kept flying it because its replacement never came,” a source said.
As reported by ThePrint, the delivery of the Tejas MK1A is likely to begin only in the first quarter of 2026 since the IAF is clear that it will accept only fully ready fighters.
Defence sources said that four distinct features that the IAF wanted from the Tejas Mk1A—which itself was a compromise reached in 2015 between it and HAL—have not been completed yet. This includes integration and firing validity of specialised munitions, integration of Electronic Warfare suite, etc.
The actual deliveries were contracted to start from February 2024 but engine delivery delays by American firm GE along with other issues have delayed the programme.”
What Mr Philip does not say but the cynic inside us suspects is that America will not GE supply the engines for the Tejas unless the Indo-US Free Trade Agreement is completed (although the HAL chief keeps reassuring the nation that the GE engines are coming to India any day now). And without those GE engines, the Indian Air Force’s 42 year long wait for a light combat aircraft will continue. Meanwhile, China continues selling its fifth generation fighter jets to Pakistan.
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