Roving Periscope: With Rs. 1.34 trillion back-ups, HAL soars on cloud nine
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: India’s state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), packed with a huge demand ahead, is in talks with at least four countries to sell its indigenously-developed Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Tejas, in what is being viewed as a big boost to the Centre’s Atma Nirbhar Bharat campaign.
New Delhi is looking to triple defense exports in the next two years as India braces to become completely self-reliant in this sector within a decade.
At present, HAL has an order book position of Rs 84,000 crore, and another Rs 50,000 crore worth of orders are in the pipeline, the media, quoting the company’s Chairman and Managing Director C B Ananthakrishnan, said on Tuesday.
“We are in a comfortable position today with an order of Rs 84,000 crore we are sitting on, and orders in the pipeline are about Rs 50,000 crore,” he said.
Indigenization has been given thrust in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emphasis on Atma Nirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India), he said.
Ananthakrishnan said Argentina and Egypt have evinced interest in buying the HAL-built Tajas. While Argentina’s requirement is 15 aircraft, Egypt wanted a fleet of 20 LCAs, he said on the sidelines of Aero India 2023, Asia’s largest air show underway at Air Force Station, Yelahanka, Bengaluru.
In addition, Malaysia has shortlisted the Tejas light fighter jet for an order of around 10 to 20 planes, and Botswana has also expressed interest. He added that HAL is also in talks with the Philippines to sell its light-combat helicopters.
“There is a lot of interest generated in the global aerospace market. Sooner or later we will have a breakthrough order,” he said.
India has been one of the world’s biggest importers of defense equipment for decades, but it has punched below its weight in the global arms export market.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday set out ambitions to more than triple the value of annual defense exports to USD 5 billion over the next two years and his government has been making diplomatic efforts to export the Tejas.
In 2021, the Government of India gave a USD 6 billion contract to HAL for 83 of the locally-produced Tejas jets for delivery starting in 2023, four decades after the design began in 1983.
The Tejas has been beset by design and other challenges and was once rejected by the Indian Navy as too heavy.
HAL plans to use the General Electric-manufactured 414 engine on a second generation of light-combat aircraft, Ananthkrishnan said, adding it was in talks to produce those engines in India.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, where it was originally founded by the Walchand Hirachand Group in 1940 as a private company, HAL is among the oldest and largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world. The existing HAL came into being in 1964. It has over 28,000 employees.
In 2022, its revenue was USD 3.1 billion (Rs. 24,600 crores) and assets amounted to USD 6.7 billion ((Rs. 53,120 crore).
