India is exploring a parallel route for upgrading its Su-30MKI fleet to prevent a sharp dip in combat capability and to compress timelines that would otherwise stretch well into the 2030s if it relied only on the indigenous Super Sukhoi program.

The Super Sukhoi upgrade, led by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, is currently planned for just 84 Su-30MKIs out of a fleet of around 260 aircraft, with the remaining nearly 175 jets left outside the present scope.

The project has Acceptance of Necessity and a large budgetary outlay cleared at the Defence Acquisition Council level, but it is still awaiting the final green light from the Cabinet Committee on Security headed by the prime minister.

Once sanctioned, development, testing and certification are expected to take several years, and even optimistic assessments point to the first fully upgraded aircraft only around the late 2020s, with the complete upgrade of all 84 aircraft stretching out over roughly 15 years.

Senior defence sources have cautioned that depending solely on this indigenous path risks pushing meaningful fleet-wide capability gains well into the next decade, which is unacceptable given the current threat environment and squadron strength.

The IAF is already operating with only about 31 fighter squadrons against an authorised strength of 42, at a time when China is expanding its fifth-generation J-20 fleet and is promoting the J-35 to Pakistan, including an offer of 40 jets.

In this context, New Delhi has been assessing Russia’s Su-57 as a possible interim fifth-generation solution, even as indigenous programmes like AMCA remain several years away from operational service.

However, any off-the-shelf Su-57 acquisition would primarily plug the top-end stealth segment and cannot by itself solve the broader 4.5-generation mass and numbers problem at squadron level. The Su-30MKI, being the numerical backbone of the IAF, must therefore avoid any capability trough during this transition, which is why planners are looking at ways to accelerate and widen upgrades beyond the 84-aircraft cap of the Super Sukhoi plan.

The parallel-track concept being discussed mirrors the earlier MiG-21 Bison upgrade model, in which a portion of the fleet was modernised in Russia and the rest in India using Russian knockdown kits. In that template, the Russian plant carried out initial upgrades, established processes and supplied kits, while Indian facilities progressively took over larger volumes, allowing faster throughput without overloading domestic capacity.

Applied to the Su-30MKI, this would likely see a segment of aircraft being upgraded at a Russian facility such as the Sokol Aircraft Plant, with concurrent upgrade lines in India using supplied kits and technical assistance.

This approach offers a way to bring more of the 175 non–Super Sukhoi jets to a higher standard in a shorter period, while HAL and the IAF focus their most complex integration work on the 84-aircraft indigenous Super Sukhoi block.

At the technical level, the Super Sukhoi package envisages new radar, improved infrared search and track sensors, upgraded electronic warfare suites and modern avionics, thereby extending Su-30MKI service life to around 2055 and enhancing lethality and survivability.

The parallel route does not necessarily need to replicate the full Super Sukhoi standard on every jet, but can adopt a tiered or modular philosophy, focusing on select avionics, sensors or weapons integration to ensure that a significant fraction of the fleet reaches at least a robust 4.5-generation capability quickly. 

The logic is to avoid a situation where only a small elite sub-fleet is highly capable, while the bulk of the Su-30s lag behind against modern Chinese and Pakistani air assets. In practical terms, even incremental but rapid enhancements in radar performance, electronic warfare, and modern weapon compatibility across 100-plus aircraft could have more immediate deterrent value than waiting many years for a smaller number of fully transformed Super Sukhois.

Operationally, the IAF is also planning under a “two-front” worst-case scenario, in which it may need to sustain high-tempo operations against both China and Pakistan simultaneously. In such a setting, availability, sortie generation and fleet-wide standardisation of key capabilities can matter more than having a tiny top-end niche of ultra-modern fighters.

By spreading upgrades through a mixed Russian–Indian model, the force hopes to mitigate downtime per aircraft, rotate squadrons through upgrade and training cycles more efficiently, and smoothen logistics and maintenance transitions to the new standard. This is also intended to reduce the risk that an extended upgrade queue grounds too many aircraft at once, thereby aggravating the squadron shortage at precisely the moment when airpower is needed most.

From an industrial perspective, the parallel route balances strategic autonomy with pragmatic capacity constraints. On one hand, the Super Sukhoi programme is central to India’s longer-term objective of deepening indigenous capability in avionics integration, mission systems and life-extension of complex combat aircraft.

On the other hand, HAL and associated Indian vendors have finite manpower, test infrastructure and integration bandwidth, which could quickly become a bottleneck if all 250-plus Su-30MKIs were routed through purely domestic lines. By distributing part of the workload to Russian facilities under a MiG-21 Bison–style model, India can leverage existing Russian expertise on the type while using the imported kits pathway to keep domestic assembly lines busy and learning, without overwhelming them.

Strategically, exploring this parallel route is therefore a risk-mitigation measure at multiple levels: combat capability, timelines, and industrial capacity. It aims to ensure that while India moves towards a future mix of Rafale, TEJAS variants, AMCA and possibly Su-57, the present-day backbone fleet of Su-30MKIs does not become a vulnerability due to obsolescence or prolonged time in upgrade docks.

The IAF’s planners appear to be signalling that the service can no longer afford sequential, slow-burn modernisation in a rapidly evolving regional airpower balance, and must instead pursue concurrent, multi-track solutions to keep its order of battle credible. In that sense, the move towards a Russian-supported parallel Su-30MKI upgrade line is less a departure from indigenisation and more an attempt to synchronise immediate operational needs with longer-term self-reliance goals.

Agencies