Weekly signals digest

On 6 October Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is to mark HAL Koraput's 2,000th aero-engine delivery and lay the foundation stone for a Rs 218 crore second production line for the Shakti helicopter engine. The line is planned, not built, and Shakti is a joint design with Safran, so it adds Indian capacity for a licensed engine rather than a fully indigenous one.

Noida-based IG Defence says it test-fired two solid rocket motors for JWALA, a private micro-missile meant as a lower-cost hard-kill layer against drones. It is a real propulsion step, but the company has shown no guided flight, intercept or user evaluation yet, and the performance figures in circulation are concept claims.

On 1 October Mahindra and Embraer named Nagpur as the proposed site for a C-390 Millennium final assembly line, contingent on the aircraft winning the Indian Air Force's Medium Transport Aircraft (MTA) competition. There is no contract, investment figure or timeline yet, so the signal is where a transport-aircraft industrial base would sit if the bid succeeds.

India's AMCA programme has moved from propulsion partnerships and design ambition to an industrial deadline. Three private-sector formations are competing to build the first prototypes, final bids are due by 30 October, and the programme is targeting a September 2028 maiden flight, backed by a new flight-test centre in Andhra Pradesh.

The Technology Development Board under DST has signed a Rs 130 crore agreement with Bengaluru's BigEndian Semiconductors for Project VeerAI, a Rs 260 crore camera-focused AI vision system-on-chip meant to move from TRL-5 to TRL-9. The first market is secure CCTV and surveillance. It is development funding, not production, and the process node and timeline were not disclosed.

The National Supercomputing Mission now reports 40 deployed systems with a combined 68 petaflops as of September 2026, up from 37 systems and 40 petaflops reported in December 2025. Thirteen systems exceed one petaflop, and the mission is working towards 50 systems and over 123 petaflops, alongside indigenous servers, interconnects and cooling.

QNu Labs, BISAG-N and IIT Gandhinagar report a 5.56 km free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) link run on the night of 27-28 September, with an error rate below 5% and a secure key rate of 230-260 bits per second. The result was announced on 3 October and is described as India's first free-space QKD link. It is a short-range field trial; the performance figures come from the participants and a government statement.

Transporter-18 lifted off on 1 October (US time) with three Indian private-space payloads aboard: TakeMe2Space's orbital-computing satellite MOI-1A, SatLeo Labs' thermal-imaging CubeSat TAPAS-1 and Dhruva Space's LEAP-2 hosted-payload mission. The mix shows Indian firms moving into compute, sensing and mission integration, while the chips, star tracker and launcher are still foreign.