New Delhi: India's Indegeneously built Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) "Tejas" has grabbed the attention of foreign buyers like Sri Lanka and Egypt, of late. While the producer of the Tejas, the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has well aware of the growing demand of the fighter jet it wants supply the product to the customer back home-the Indian Air Force (IAF) first.
Notably, Egypt had signed a contract with France last year to buy its Rafale fighter jet, the same aircraft for which India has reached an agreement with the country on Friday. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned it has recently pulled out of a deal with Pakistan to buy its JF-17 aircraft built with Chinese help. Taking into account all these factors it is believed that, the Tejas is gaining ground with each passing day.While Sri Lanka and Egypt have shown interest in buying the Tejas, they are interested in going for its current version against an upgraded one. Worth mentioning, Government wants to induct 120 Tejas to IAF in the coming days, from which around 100 would be upgraded ones. For the manufacturing of the upgraded Tejas aircrafts HAL will collaborate with Swedish aerospace measure Saab. The aircraft would be readied by 2018.
Mentioning of the priorities of the HAL, HAL chairman T Suvarna Raju has insisted that the, the confidence of the foreign buyers would boost further when our own IAF would use indigenous Tejas in a very large scale.