Why doesn't India build a large narrowbody jet?

Every large single-aisle airliner flying in Indian skies was built somewhere else. India's A320-family and 737-family fleet — the workhorse of its domestic aviation — is effectively 100% imported, with Airbus and Boeing together supplying over 90% of the commercial aircraft the country operates as of 2025. India designs fighters and launches rockets, yet it has never built a jetliner in this class.

A large narrowbody is a 150-to-230-seat single-aisle aircraft, the A320/737 category that holds roughly 60-70% of global commercial aircraft orders. Only four powers build aircraft in this class: the United States, France through Airbus, China, and Russia. Joining that group is one of the harder feats in industrial engineering.

The difficulty is structural, not a matter of ambition. A certified airliner rests on a stack of capabilities India does not yet possess. It needs a high-bypass turbofan — the propulsion for a 150-plus-seat aircraft — and India has no certified civil turbofan. It needs a route to certify a transport-category airliner to ICAO, EASA and FAA standards, a certification capability still only emerging. Beneath that sit fly-by-wire digital flight controls, an integrated commercial avionics suite, aerospace-grade aluminium alloys and carbon-fibre composites able to survive an airframe's fatigue life, a high-rate final assembly line, a tier-1 aerostructure supply chain, and a worldwide product-support and MRO network — because airlines require global spares and support before they will order. Most of these enablers are demonstrated or emerging; none is mature at airliner scale.

India's own history shows how far the climb is. Its only prior indigenous civil transport, the NAL Saras, is a small light-transport turboprop of around 14-19 seats — not a jetliner. It first flew in 2004, suffered a fatal crash in 2009, was reported cancelled in 2016 and later revived; in February 2019 the Ministry of Finance approved ₹6,000 crore for production. Even the current forward-looking proposal aims far below narrowbody scale. National Aerospace Laboratories, with HAL, has proposed the RTA-90, a 90-seat twin-engine turbofan for 300-1,000 km short-haul routes. NAL's roughly US$2 billion development request remains unapproved, and HAL had abandoned earlier Regional Transport Aircraft efforts in 2015. The programme sits at the study stage. Meanwhile regional airlines fly imported ATR turboprops.

Why the gap persists comes down to sustained money and the missing engine. China's Comac C919, built to challenge the A320 and 737, was backed by an estimated US$49-72 billion in state support and has secured over 1,000 orders — and it still relies on Western components such as CFM LEAP engines from GE and Safran. Russia's state-backed Yakovlev MC-21 is a comparable effort against the 737 MAX and A320neo. The scale is the point: tens of billions of dollars over decades. India's stalled request is around US$2 billion, and for the smaller regional class. The lack of an indigenous jet engine remains the key missing enabler.

The dependence is not only economic. Import reliance became a live vulnerability when Russia, under sanctions, resorted to cannibalising aircraft for spares — the kind of exposure an indigenous airliner would mitigate. And the latent demand is large: India carried about 150 million domestic passengers in 2023, a figure projected to roughly double by 2030, met entirely by imported aircraft.

What it would take is visible in the record of those who have done it: sustained, multi-decade funding at a scale far beyond a single unapproved request, an indigenous certified turbofan, and a certification pathway to international standards — built up first at the regional-jet class before the narrowbody. The mountain is known. What remains is the decision to start climbing it in earnest.