Tejas – Made In India – Ahem, Not Really

I did try to find a pic of what I saw on the tele just a few minutes ago. A pic of the Tejas plane with ‘Made In India’ written across the body. Would go great with this post as I was planning to paint a big question mark on it. Guess I didn’t try hard enough.

I am sure that by now almost all of you would have heard / read the news about TEJAS, supposedly India’s indigenous LCA (In case you haven’t, click here for one such article).

Perhaps some enthusiastic individuals have tweeted and/or blogged about it and are now busy broadcasting their pride over BBm’s. 

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News Flash – At best, Tejas is ASSEMBLED in India. It’s definitely NOT made in India. Not yet anyways. You see, the engine is a F404-GE-IN20 from General Electric – which clearly isn’t an Indian manufacturer (psst – GE is US Based).

I agree I don’t know much about fighter planes, but I am assuming an engine (if not the most important) – would at least qualify as one of the most important parts of the plane.

It gets EVEN better. Apparently the radar, some navigation technologies and some display systems are imported as well. Made in India – Ha!

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It’s not like I was surfing the web looking for something nasty to write about this news item. Here is what happened - I was watching Star News (we do it at times, just for laughs. It’s not a NEWS channel for us. It’s a 24 hr comedy channel).

The reporter covering the story goes something like ‘Everything is Indian about Tejas except the engine’!!

At that point, I cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing. Obviously I missed the entire story and decided to Google up just how Indian is Tejas and this is what I came up with:

Link

Some more interesting reports:

According to NDTV, the idea for Tejas came 27 years ago. The actual work started 10 years ago! Question – What were they doing for the 17 years in between? Designing the ‘Made in India’ banner??.

Anyways, the more important question is – 27 years and INR 14,500 crore (that’s INR 145 Billion, if I am not mistaken) later – you STILL don’t have an engine for this thing? Not to mention the radar, navigation and display systems!!?

Harp on all you want, but this really isn’t something to be proud about.  Dikhaawon pe mat jaao. Apni akal ladaao.

UPDATE:

At least TOI decided to wake up and mention some reasons why this is not really a kodak moment for Indian pride. Click here for the article.