Why Aircraft MRO Must Become a National Industrial Priority for India

India is entering a decisive phase in its civil aviation trajectory. Indian airlines have placed one of the largest aircraft orders in global aviation history—about 1,500 aircraft currently on order—reflecting the country’s position as the world’s third-largest aviation market and among the fastest growing. Rising passenger demand, regional connectivity, and income growth have made this expansion inevitable rather than speculative.

Public discourse around this aircraft surge has so far focused on the most visible labour implications: the projected requirement for tens of thousands of pilots, hundreds of thousands of cabin crew and ground staff, and the rapid expansion of flight schools and aviation training facilities over the next decade. These projections are valid—but incomplete. They overlook a quieter, structurally more consequential requirement: aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO).

Every aircraft inducted into a fleet creates a multi-decade obligation for inspection, repair, component replacement, and overhaul. Maintenance is not an optional service layered on top of aviation growth; it is the industrial backbone that sustains flight operations. As India’s fleet expands, the question is no longer whether MRO demand will rise, but where that demand will be met.

MRO as a Strategic Node in India’s Aviation Expansion

Aircraft MRO occupies a unique position at the intersection of multiple strategic imperatives.

First, it is inseparable from civil aviation expansion. Larger fleets mechanically translate into larger maintenance workloads, irrespective of passenger cycles or airline profitability.

Second, MRO localisation addresses persistent foreign exchange leakage. At present, a significant share of Indian aircraft maintenance spending flows to facilities in South-East Asia or South-West Asia. For a fleet of India’s scale, continued dependence on foreign MRO is financially inefficient and, over time, politically untenable.

Third, MRO is a source of skilled, non-automatable employment. Aircraft maintenance is safety-critical, regulation-bound, and rooted in physical inspection and judgment. It is a form of embodied cognition—precisely the category of work least vulnerable to artificial intelligence.

Fourth, MRO capabilities have civil-defence dual-use value. Tooling, certification systems, inspection protocols, and human capital developed for civil aviation directly strengthen a country’s broader aerospace ecosystem.

Finally, MRO generates long-duration, annuity-like revenues. Unlike aircraft manufacturing or airline operations, maintenance demand persists steadily across economic cycles, anchored to aircraft life spans rather than discretionary consumption.

Seen together, aircraft MRO is not an auxiliary service. It is industrial infrastructure with a labour core.

MRO and the Overlooked Component Economy

One often overlooked dimension of aircraft maintenance is that MRO is as much about components as it is about labour and hangars. Aircraft maintenance involves the continuous replacement of worn-out, damaged, or time-expired parts—ranging from fasteners and brackets to wiring assemblies, panels, ducts, sensors, and other line-replaceable units.

This is where India’s existing integration into global aerospace supply chains becomes relevant. Both Boeing and Airbus already source a growing volume of aircraft components from Indian suppliers, primarily for final aircraft assembly. Airbus has recently indicated plans to significantly expand its sourcing from India over the next few years.

While components manufactured for original equipment production are not automatically eligible for MRO use—given the distinct certification, traceability, and regulatory requirements involved—a domestic MRO ecosystem, nonetheless, can create a natural adjacent market. As India’s maintenance base expands, Indian component manufacturers gain incentives to move up the after-market value-chain by pursuing MRO-specific certifications, repairability standards, and replacement part approvals.

In effect, aircraft MRO does not merely generate service employment. It can also thicken domestic industry, allowing India’s aerospace suppliers to serve not only global OEM production lines, but eventually the long-cycle maintenance economy that sustains aircraft throughout their operational lives.

Domestic Necessity, Not Export Ambition

India’s MRO expansion is often discussed in aspirational terms—competing with Singapore or Dubai as a regional maintenance hub. This framing is premature. The immediate logic is domestic.

With around 1,500 aircraft entering Indian fleets in the next few years, it is neither financially prudent nor strategically viable to outsource the lifetime maintenance of such a large share of national air traffic. Operational resilience, turnaround times, safety oversight, and regulatory accountability all weaken when maintenance is externalised at scale.

Recent aircraft safety incidents, including the Ahmedabad air disaster, only sharpen this reality. While no single incident explains systemic risk, such events underline the importance of dense domestic maintenance ecosystems, deeper manpower pools, and institutional redundancy. Safety, in aviation, is cumulative—and cumulative safety requires cumulative capability.

Export-oriented MRO can follow once domestic demand is securely met. For the next decade, India’s MRO story is fundamentally about internal capacity building.

Aircraft MRO and the Employment Question in the AI Era

From a sociological perspective, aircraft MRO may be one of the most under-appreciated employment opportunities in contemporary India.

It is neither low-skill work nor cutting edge R&D. It is mid-tech industrial work—the very category where India produces vast numbers of graduates but struggles to provide skill-matching employment.

Aircraft MRO absorbs talent from:

Mechanical, and electrical engineering

Computer science and engineering

Electronic and communication engineering  

Physics and materials science

Chemistry, especially in fuels, corrosion, composites, and coatings

These disciplines are already taught across India’s tier-1 to tier-4 engineering colleges and industrial training institutes. The problem has never been educational supply; it has been industrial absorption.

Moreover, MRO facilities are well-suited to on-site skilling and apprenticeship programs, allowing workers to earn, train, and certify simultaneously. In an era marked by anxiety over AI-driven displacement of cognitive white-collar work, aircraft MRO stands out as a sector where thinking is inseparable from doing, and accountability cannot be abstracted away.

Geography, Scale, and Why Large Infrastructure Players Matter

Aircraft MRO is capital-intensive, regulation-heavy, and slow to mature. Certification timelines are long, tooling and hangar infrastructure are expensive, and skilled manpower must be built gradually rather than hired off the shelf. This makes MRO fundamentally different from many aviation-adjacent services. It is not a plug-and-play business. It requires patient capital, regulation-compliance stamina, and operational depth.

This is why the entry of large infrastructure groups into aircraft MRO matters disproportionately. Smaller firms may innovate at the margins, but only large players can absorb long gestation periods while simultaneously investing in training pipelines, certification processes, and multi-location capacity.

In this context, the Adani Group’s recent foray into aircraft MRO—through acquisitions—is a significant development. The Group has outlined plans to develop new MRO facilities in Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, and Guwahati, signalling both scaling ambition and geographic decentralisation.

What is notable here is not merely capital commitment, but location choice. By anchoring MRO facilities outside the traditional tier-1 aviation hubs, Adani strategy implicitly recognises that aircraft maintenance is not a megapolitan indulgence but an industrial necessity — one that can seed regional skill ecosystems, logistics networks, and long-term employment in tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

This is not diversification for its own sake. It is the industrialisation of a structural service-gap created by India’s own aviation growth — one that only large, integrated infrastructure players are positioned to address at the required scale.

From Piecemeal Support to National Priority

Thus far, aircraft MRO in India has received fragmented attention—tax rationalisation here, policy tweaks there, sporadic skill initiatives elsewhere. The scale of fleet expansion now underway makes this approach inadequate.

Aircraft MRO requires a holistic national priority, integrating:

Aviation and airport policy

Skill development and apprenticeship frameworks

Safety regulation and certification capacity

Industrial land and logistics planning

Long-term capital alignment

In the coming decade, the question is not whether India will operate one of the world’s largest aviation fleets—it certainly will. The real question is whether India will own the industrial ecosystem that sustains that fleet, or continue to outsource one of its most employment-rich, safety-critical, and strategically valuable layers.

In an age where software thinks faster and cheaper every year, India’s employment future may depend less on thinking harder—and more on building industries where thinking remains inseparable from touch, tools, and trust.