India's ambitious Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) appears to have entered an important phase, with the defence ministry issuing a request for proposal (RFP) for the proposed project.
Three consortia, led by private-sector companies, are in the race to develop the prototypes of the project.
Quoting defence officials, news agency ANI said in a tweet: “Defence ministry today issued the request for proposal for the mega indigenous fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft project to the three shortlisted bidders, including Larsen & Toubro-Bharat Electronics Limited, Tata Advanced Systems Limited and Bharat Forge-BEML.”
Tata Advanced Systems Limited is bidding as an independent entity.
The move comes exactly a year after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh approved the AMCA execution model, offering equal opportunities to both the private and public sectors on a competitive basis. They were allowed to bid either independently or as a joint venture or as consortia. “The entity/bidder should be an Indian company compliant with the laws and regulations of the country,” the government had said.
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The winner will be decided based on the bids presented by these three consortia and will work with the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to come up with five prototypes before moving to large-scale manufacturing.
Reports had earlier said the AMCA prototypes are expected to be manufactured and flown by 2032, giving the Indian Air Force (IAF) a homegrown fifth-generation fighter with stealth capabilities in the near future.
While the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is out of the AMCA prototype development race, the PSU is still expected to compete in the larger production tender after the jet successfully completes testing and development.
“We could have been perfectly happy if HAL were there in AMCA, but even if they are not, I would imagine this is the prototype stage, so at the production stage, they could still get their chance,” Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh had recently said.
The government had said the execution model for the project is an important step towards harnessing the indigenous expertise, capability and capacity to develop the AMCA prototype, which will be a major milestone towards Aatmanirbhar Bharat in the aerospace sector.