India can build fighter airframes. What it has never managed to build is a fighter engine. That single gap has hobbled Indian air power for decades — and on 14 August 2026, the country’s richest man announced a plan to close it.

Reliance Industries, the conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is teaming up with Britain’s Rolls-Royce to jointly design, develop and manufacture an indigenous engine for India’s Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), the stealth fighter New Delhi is racing to field. For a company best known for oil, telecoms and retail, it is a dramatic move into the hardest corner of aerospace.

If it works, it would end one of the most stubborn dependencies in Indian defence.

The Engine India Never Had

Every Indian fighter flying today breathes through a foreign engine. The indigenous Tejas light combat aircraft is powered by American General Electric F404 and F414 engines; the Su-30MKI uses Russian AL-31s; the Rafale uses French M88s. India’s own Kaveri engine programme, begun in the 1980s, never produced a powerplant good enough to fly a frontline fighter. The result is a strategic vulnerability: even when India builds the jet, it cannot fly it without a supplier abroad signing off.

That dependency has bitten hard and recently. Deliveries of the latest Tejas Mk1A stalled in part over the supply of GE’s F404 engines — brand-new Indian fighters sitting on the ground waiting for imported hearts. A sovereign engine is the missing piece of “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, India’s self-reliance drive.

Tejas and AMCA: the fighters at the heart of India’s drive for an indigenous aerospace industry.

Why Reliance and Rolls-Royce

The pairing is unusual but logical. Rolls-Royce brings something almost no one else will share: genuine expertise in designing military jet engines, a club of perhaps a handful of companies worldwide. Reliance brings capital, manufacturing scale and a track record of executing enormous industrial projects. The two say they will build a dedicated gas-turbine complex and explore wider work across defence, civil aerospace and power systems.

A Long Road Ahead

Caution is warranted. Designing a modern fighter engine is arguably harder than designing the aircraft around it, and neither company has disclosed a budget, a timeline, or which AMCA variant the engine is meant for. The AMCA itself is still years from a prototype, currently targeted around 2028, and India has separately shortlisted private firms to help build the airframe. A joint venture announcement is not a running engine.

Still, the significance is hard to overstate. If Reliance and Rolls-Royce can put a home-built engine in the back of an Indian stealth fighter, India joins a tiny group of nations able to power their own frontline jets — and finally stops waiting on someone else to deliver the one part it could never make.

Sources: Forbes; Reliance Industries; Rolls-Royce; Indian Ministry of Defence.