# India Could Have Its First Made in India Civilian Aircraft Within Two Years, Says Aviation Minister

> Civil Aviation Minister K. Rammohan Naidu says a joint venture could produce India's first indigenously built civilian aircraft within two years, though he kept the partner, aircraft type and manufacturing location under wraps.

- Source: India Max
- Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/india-could-have-its-first-made-in-india-civilian-aircraft-within-two-years-says-aviation-minister
- Author: India Max Staff
- Section: Business
- Published: 2026-10-07T15:17:54.736Z
- Updated: 2026-10-07T15:17:54.736Z
- Tags: Aviation, Made in India, Tata, Civil Aviation
- Hindi edition: https://indiamax.net/hi/article/india-could-have-its-first-made-in-india-civilian-aircraft-within-two-years-says-aviation-minister

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Civil Aviation Minister K. Rammohan Naidu has said India could roll out its first made in India civilian aircraft within the next two years, speaking at a symposium organised by the Indian Foundation for Quality Management in New Delhi. He framed the timeline around a joint venture, telling the gathering that within two years the country would be able to have a Made-in-India civilian aircraft, without naming the partner, the type of aircraft involved, the scale of investment or where it would be built.

Naidu tied the ambition to the sheer scale of demand building up in Indian aviation. He pointed out that Indian airlines currently have more than 1,600 aircraft on order, a pipeline worth an estimated 100 billion dollars, against a domestic fleet that today numbers around 850 aircraft. With more than 100 new airports expected to come up over the next decade, the minister suggested the market opening up was large enough to justify building aircraft at home rather than relying entirely on imports.

While Naidu did not confirm specifics, the remarks land against a backdrop of several programmes already taking shape. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited has been in discussions with Russia's United Aircraft Corporation around potentially manufacturing the SJ-100, a roughly 100 seat regional jet, at facilities that could be based in Kanpur or Nashik, with estimates suggesting an Indian market of more than 200 aircraft in that size category alone. Separately, Embraer and Adani Defence and Aerospace have been exploring a regional transport aircraft ecosystem, with the E175 regional jet among the possibilities under discussion.

The closest existing template for what a civilian programme might look like is the Airbus-Tata partnership already running in Vadodara, where Tata Advanced Systems is producing C295 transport aircraft for India's defence forces under a roughly 22,000 crore rupee agreement covering 56 aircraft, with 40 of them built on Indian soil. That programme has given India hands on experience with large scale aircraft assembly, even though its output is destined for military rather than commercial use.

Naidu's remarks also pointed to a broader push on the supply chain side, noting that Airbus and Boeing currently source around 4 billion dollars worth of components annually from Indian suppliers, a figure the government wants to see rise to 10 billion dollars by the end of the decade. Taken together, the comments sketch out an aviation sector the government wants to see move well beyond assembly and sourcing toward building complete aircraft of its own.

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Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/india-could-have-its-first-made-in-india-civilian-aircraft-within-two-years-says-aviation-minister.