Private Indian companies will build the first prototypes of the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), a fifth-generation fighter, after Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) failed to qualify in the evaluation for the roughly ₹15,000 crore contract.

Three remaining contenders—Tata Advanced Systems Limited, a Larsen & Toubro-led group, and a Bharat Forge-led group—will compete to produce five flying prototypes and one structural test aircraft in partnership with the Aeronautical Development Agency.

Defence Secretary R.K. Singh stated that HAL’s exclusion resulted from a routine technical shortfall rather than its large order backlog, reflecting a policy aim to create a second fighter production line beyond the state-owned firm.

Somewhere on a drawing board in Bengaluru sits the shape of India’s most ambitious aircraft yet: the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, or AMCA, a fifth-generation fighter designed to slip past enemy radar the way a shadow slips past a lamp. When its first prototypes take shape, they will be built by private Indian companies. The organisation that has assembled every Indian fighter till date, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, will not be among them. That has never happened before in the country’s combat aviation story. It is a quiet revolution, decided not on a battlefield but in an evaluation........

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