That may translate to a 1000 combat aircraft IAF, but that does not seem to be in the minds of Planners.
Be it disdain for indigenous products or general lack of product performance the Tejas seems to be slated for no more than a 150.
The Navy may be the one that actually adopts the Tejas as its own and the N-LCA has a much better potential than the AF version.
Basically, the IAF seems to have decided on a force comprising more of heavy hitters and do-it-all medium weights rather than a three tier force.
The attitude of the IAF vis-a'-vis the Tejas seems to be that of the step-child, grudgingly carrying it along rather than with full enthusiasm. Perhaps that is how the Staff requirement of the IAF see's it.
The IN on the other hand, may have a gem in the Tejas as it gets a reasonable strike asset which is small enough to be stored in enough numbers on its carriers.
On the topic:
The Mirage-2000 also carried a lot more than the Tejas does, so even with comparable T/W .. the Mirage-2000 is able to carry more to the target.
The Tejas's T/W may be preventing it from carrying the load that the IAF wants it to carry all the way to the target and still be able to defend itself.
The IAF has, in fact, decided on a policy that concentrates its strength on one or two aircraft, most of whom are intended to be multi-role in nature, and I can't help feeling that there is a deep-seated lack of confidence in the purchasing process at the bottom of all this. Time and again, the Air Force has seen its procurement plans being delayed enormously, either because the best source of equipment cut off supplies due to some stupid political decision (Vajpayee and the bomb for instance), or because some crook in the civil service or the government wasn't getting enough, so pulled the plug. So instead of multiple purchases of air superiority, interception, interdiction and ground attack, the Air Force tries to buy planes that will do a bit of everything. In addition because procurement takes so long aircraft types that should have been retired ages ago remain in inventory, creating a logistics and stores nightmare (at one time, there were 23 aircraft types in inventory, and when we were asked to standardise the maintenance documentation, we found that some aircraft had manuals missing, even with their erstwhile suppliers!!!). So here we are, the same planes are being asked to perform as strike aircraft and as air superiority fighters. And the Air Force are also reacting to the known incompetence of HAL by trying to reduce the numbers in service,so that the mess being made on maintenance is minimised.
The Tejas case was entirely different, and it was a harmony between DRDO's delays in implementing the Tejas design and prototyping, feeding on the IAF's consequent insistence on updating the QSR, which meant further re-design. What started off as a MiG 21 replacement is now being compared to the Mirage! That is insane.
The Navy, on the other hand, has a different set of problems. It got involved in ship design much earlier than the other two services made equivalent steps (they haven't, even today), and today, with its design collaborators, it doesn't depend on DRDO any more. Their problem is on throughput; the public sector shipyards, at their impossible rates of production and laughable productivity, are holding up the entire naval programme, and giving Pakistan and China unnecessary salients in inventory which will have implications if there is hostility in the next two or three years. So when they get a product like Tejas, they fall upon it in preference to any overseas equipment (the Navy was one of the worst sufferers when we were being quarantined) and try to make the most of it. I left it out of my earlier note so as to confuse one issue at a time.
