Vayushakti-26 Is Modi's Aatmanirbhar Bharat Moment

Today, above Pokhran, India's homegrown defence ecosystem must prove it has substance behind the slogan.

There is something deliberate about choosing Pokhran. The same desert range where India twice detonated nuclear devices will today host Exercise Vayushakti-26, the Indian Air Force’s largest firepower demonstration in years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has spent a decade building the rhetorical architecture of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and today, the defence ecosystem is being asked to prove it has substance behind the slogan.

The scale is designed to command attention. According to the Ministry of Defence, over 120 aircraft will participate, including 77 frontline fighters and 43 helicopters, operating across day, dusk, and night scenarios. But the headline numbers matter less than what is flying within them. For the first time at a Vayushakti exercise, indigenous platforms are scheduled to hold centre stage rather than play supporting roles alongside imported hardware.

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President Droupadi Murmu’s decision to fly as co-pilot in the Light Combat Helicopter Prachand and conduct an aerial survey of the exercise area over Jaisalmer’s border airspace is more than ceremonial. It places the head of state inside the most visible symbol of India’s homegrown rotary-wing capability, signalling that the highest office is prepared to stake its credibility on what Indian engineering has produced.

What Indigenous Now Means on the Battlefield

The weapon systems lined up at Vayushakti-26 deserve scrutiny beyond their names. The Akash surface-to-air missile system, developed by the DRDO with a range of approximately 25 kilometres, will demonstrate India’s indigenous short-range air defence layer. India has already begun exporting Akash, a credibility test that import-substitution alone cannot pass.

Scheduled alongside SpyDer and Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems, its presence at Pokhran illustrates that layered indigenous air defence, long a gap in India’s order of battle, is beginning to close.

The Short Range Loitering Munitions on the programme represent a sharper capability edge. Their battlefield logic was validated in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh before India’s own forces deployed them, and an indigenously developed variant is now ready for public display at Pokhran. It is a meaningful compression of the technology gap between what India buys abroad and what its own laboratories produce.

The Prachand LCH is the world’s lightest combat helicopter and the only one in service designed specifically for high-altitude battlefields. Another requirement drawn directly from Kargil and the current deployment along the Line of Actual Control. These are not systems purchased and rebadged; they were all built here.

The Tejas Complication

The LCA Tejas MK1A’s reported likely absence from today’s exercise introduces an awkward note before a single aircraft has taken off. The IAF has 141 MK1A aircraft on order under a Rs 48,000-crore contract signed in 2021, but HAL’s delivery pace has drawn persistent scrutiny, complicated by supply chain bottlenecks for the GE F404 engine.

For an exercise designed to showcase India’s indigenous capability, the potential absence of India’s most prominent indigenous fighter is the kind of detail that hurts the optics.

It points to a structural problem that enthusiasm cannot paper over. HAL is simultaneously managing the MK1A production line, Prachand deliveries, Sukhoi-30 upgrades, and MK2 programme preparations.

Senior IAF officers have told the Ministry that a minimum of six to seven MK2 squadrons are needed to replace retiring MiG-21, Mirage 2000, and Jaguar fleets during the period when the AMCA is still maturing. At HAL’s projected production rate of 16 to 18 aircraft per year, even after the new Nashik facility opens around 2029-30, the last MK2 could roll off the line well into the 2040s.

DRDO Chairman Dr Samir V Kamat confirmed at the TEJAS-25 seminar in Bengaluru in January that the MK2’s first flight is expected by June 2026, series production by 2029, and IAF deliveries from 2032. These are credible targets, but only if the programme holds its line.

The AMCA and the Test of Strategic Patience

The Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft is the programme by which India’s defence ambitions will ultimately be judged. It received Cabinet Committee on Security approval for its Rs 15,000-crore prototype development phase in March 2024.

According to AMCA Project Director Krishna Rajendra Neeli, the prototype rollout is planned for late 2026 or early 2027, first flight in 2028, certification by 2032, and induction targeted for 2034. The programme now has the funding, the completed design, and the institutional commitment it lacked for years.

What it does not yet have is a resolved production model. The Aeronautical Development Agency has itself proposed selecting a private sector company over HAL, citing HAL’s ‘not-so-great delivery track-record’ — ADA’s own assessment, submitted to the Ministry.

In May 2025, the government cleared an Expression of Interest under which firms could bid for the contract to develop, produce, and maintain the aircraft. Nineteen companies expressed interest, up from six or seven at early meetings in 2023.

The engine question was, until recently, the programme’s most exposed vulnerability. India’s Gas Turbine Research Establishment spent decades and less than Rs 2,500 crore on the Kaveri engine, which never achieved the thrust required for frontline service. In August 2025, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh announced a Rs 61,000-crore joint venture with France’s Safran to co-develop a 120-kilonewton engine for the AMCA Mk2, with full intellectual property rights belonging to India. Full IPR ownership means India will retain the ability to upgrade, modify, and export the engine without returning to a foreign gatekeeper.

When a senior Trump administration official described India’s pursuit of technology transfer as “dangerous" in August 2025, disrupting confidence in the GE F414 supply chain for the MK1A, it confirmed precisely why that ownership clause is non-negotiable.

Whether the Investment Is Enough

Today’s exercise will show whether India’s defence ecosystem can produce platforms that work and weapons that strike under pressure. What it cannot show, definitely not in a single afternoon above the Thar Desert, is whether the investment sustaining this ecosystem is commensurate with the ambition.

Global aerospace companies typically reinvest four to five per cent of revenue into research and development. HAL’s internal R&D spending has historically lagged those benchmarks, with production backlogs absorbing resources that might have funded deeper technology development.

The government’s shift towards a private industry partnership model for AMCA is a structural correction, not an optional reform. The Tata consortium’s MK1A production bid, which came in 18 to 22 per cent below HAL’s quoted price, illustrated the competitive pressure a more open market can apply.

But what the years since 2014 have shown is that the first phase of Aatmanirbhar Bharat in defence has been real. The Prachand flies. The Akash intercepts. India was importing roughly 70 per cent of its defence equipment a decade ago; that share has shifted materially. What the next phase requires is not more ambition — there is no shortage of that — but sustained R&D investment, honest reckoning with production timelines, and the discipline to ask whether HAL alone can carry the weight of both the MK2 and the AMCA. The desert above Pokhran is about to light up. The harder test follows immediately after.

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