Enduring uncertainty over when — or even whether — the US-origin General Electric (GE) F414-INS6 engine will be produced in India, and on what technology-transfer terms and at what price, is casting an ominous shadow over two critical Indian Air Force (IAF) future fighter programmes: the Tejas Mk2 and the 5th-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), both of which are designed around the American powerplant.
This impasse over the F-414 assumes added significance with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio due in Mumbai on October 20 for talks with his counterpart, Union external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, that are expected to cover energy, trade and investment, defence, and critical and emerging technologies. Official and industry sources said the discussions could also include aspects of the protracted and contentious negotiations between GE and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) ongoing for over three years.
“The vital question for the IAF looming over the Tejas Mk2 and the AMCA is how both programmes can get off the ground without the F-414 engine deal on terms India is willing to accept,” said an industry official associated with both programmes, but declining to be identified.
But if the F-414 deal collapses, as it well could, he warned, the consequences for the IAF could be ‘catastrophic’, leaving it hard-pressed to arrest the erosion of its fighter Squadron strength. This is already down to just 28-29 squadrons against a sanctioned 42.5 and is set to shrink further, even as China fields 5th-generation fighters, tests 6th-generation prototypes and Pakistan moves towards imminently acquiring Chinese stealth combat aircraft.
The June 2023 memorandum of understanding (MoU) between GE and HAL, signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington, included the potential co-production of F-414 engines in India for the Tejas Mk2, following a mutually agreed arrangement covering technology transfer, pricing and the terms of local manufacture. The US completed the required congressional notification process soon after in late August 2023, clearing the way for technical and commercial negotiations.
Optimism over F414 deal grows bleak
In recent weeks, however, the optimism over clinching the F-414 engine deal on terms acceptable to New Delhi has grown somewhat bleaker, as bilateral trade talks remain stuck in limbo, bogged down by disputes over US tariffs and reciprocal market access. On October 5, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that India–US trade negotiations had reached a “plateau” beyond which further concessions by either side would be “very, very difficult”, though talks were continuing and were slated to reach fruition.
To make matters worse, Washington has tightened the screws on issuing H-1B visas for Indian information technology professionals and is adversely scrutinising work visa-extensions for those already in the US. And though Washington has temporarily waived key duties under a new law authorising tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas, the possibility of renewed economic pressure on India as a major procurer of fossil fuels from Moscow, persists. Industry officials cautioned that the “immediate risk” was that these wider trade, immigration and energy disputes could ‘derail’ the already protracted F-414 negotiations, putting at grave risk an engine deal vital to the IAF’s future fighter programmes.
Alongside, the wider bilateral political climate between India and the US too has become increasingly unfavourable under US President Donald Trump, with Jaishankar recently taking a broader swipe at how Washington’s global role was significantly changing. He maintained that the US had deliberately chosen to ‘step back’ and become a more ‘isolated’ power, and though he was referring to the shifting global order rather than defence ties between Delhi and Washington specifically, his observations highlighted how the wider relationship between the two had become increasingly vulnerable to political mistrust and competing national interests. Independent commentators and analysts concurred.
‘Key pillars of the India-US relationship are hollowing out’
In his weekly column for the Indian Express, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta declared on Friday (October 16) that the “key pillars of the India-US relationship are hollowing out” and that the depleting reservoir of mutual goodwill would have ‘downstream effects’. Separately, Nishant Rajeev, a senior analyst at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), suggested that India–US defence cooperation was stuck in a ‘buyer-seller loop’, with joint programmes rarely accompanied by technology transfers.
The stalemate over the F-414 between GE and HAL further exposes the fundamental fragility of the wider India–US strategic and technological partnership. Despite a slew of bilateral initiatives launched in recent years – the alphabet soup of iCET, INDUS-X and TRUST – tangible results have remained entirely elusive. Hyperbolic announcements and new institutional frameworks may look good on paper, but they do not automatically translate into combat capability or meaningful technology transfer to enable India to achieve genuine atamnirbharta or self-reliance in defence.
A closer examination of all these various programmes reveals how far their ambitions have outstripped all perceptible and concrete achievements. But this pattern is hardly new as the 2012 Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) was aimed at moving India–US defence ties beyond a buyer–seller relationship towards co-development and co-production. But most of its working groups and proposed projects languished, with cooperation on jet-engine technology suspended in 2019. More than a decade later, the promise of meaningful technology-sharing continues to resurface under new acronyms, with outcomes lagging behind rhetoric.
iCET (Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology): Announced by PM Modi and President Joe Biden in 2022, iCET aimed to shift the relationship beyond Indian buying US materiel towards genuine collaboration in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, 6G telecommunications, space and advanced military technology. Spearheaded by the two countries’ national security advisers to give it strategic weight, it has yet to deliver military technology that India can independently operationalise.
INDUS-X (India–US Defence Acceleration Ecosystem)
: Launched in June 2023 during Modi’s visit to Washington and coinciding with the MoU on the F-414, INDUS-X was intended to connect defence start-ups with investors, universities and established manufacturers. And though this has made incremental progress, it has yet to produce a publicly demonstrated pipeline of jointly developed technologies or production contracts.
TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology): Modi and Trump presented TRUST in February 2025 to partially replace as well as supplement the iCET framework, to deepen cooperation across AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, biotechnology, energy, space and critical minerals. It also envisaged closer collaboration between the two governments, universities and private industry, yet, TRUST too remains still born.
Basically, the underlying snag in the F-414 deal is not merely how much technology GE is willing to part with, but what kind. Manufacturing and industrial know-how is one thing, but access to the engine’s core intellectual property (IP), design authority and the ability to develop and upgrade it independently, are quite another. Recent media reports, quoting unnamed official sources, revealed that an eventual transfer of around 80% of manufacturing technology to HAL should not be ‘confused’ with an analogous transfer of the engine’s IP. Industry sources in Bangalore said that GE is hardly likely to surrender the ‘crown jewels’ of its engine technology, simply to enable India to become self-reliant in combat aircraft powerpacks.
Two separate negotiations
Muddling matters further are the two separate sets of ongoing negotiations with GE, blurring public discussion of the F-414 agreement.
One involves GE and HAL negotiating the local manufacture of F-414 engines for the Tejas Mk2. The other involves GE and India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and its Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), and covers an initial requirement of around 14–15 engines for AMCA prototypes and limited-series production aircraft.
Moreover, as per current IAF and ADA plans, the first two AMCA squadrons, of around 40 aircraft, would also subsequently be powered by locally made F-414s. The same engine is envisaged for the Indian Navy’s Twin Engine Deck Based Fighter (TEDBF). Consequently, all these engine requirements of the Tejas Mk2, AMCA and TEDBF are being pursued through separate, though related, arrangements, with reportedly no single agreement covering all three programmes.
Additionally, there is the cost of importing the limited number of F-414s for the AMCA programme. Estimates that had once priced each engine at around Rs 70–80 crore has been hiked by GE to around Rs 200 crore apiece in during commercial negotiations. GE is also believed to have sought some $800 million to establish a dedicated F-414 manufacturing facility in India, raising uncomfortable questions concerning the affordability of the arrangement and the price India may have to pay for technology transfer for a powerpack whose depth, manufacturing autonomy and long-term benefits remain open-ended.
“In such a possible arrangement, the danger for India is that it may end up not only manufacturing the F-414 at an inordinately higher cost but remain hopelessly dependent on critical GE technologies that matter most at even greater, additional cost,” said another industry source, declining to be named. Under such an arrangement ‘Make in India’ risks becoming little more than foreign technology assembled at home and dressed up as self-reliance, he ruefully added.
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