DRDO Invites Bids for an Indigenous Air-to-Air Refuelling Pod, Targeting a Gap Russian Tankers Can't Fill

An RFP, not a rocket test — but a real gap it's meant to close

Not every defence-tech story is a missile trial. On September 2, 2026, DRDO published a tender under its Technology Development Fund inviting Indian industry to bid for the design and development of an indigenous Air-to-Air Refuelling Pod, or AARP — a piece of hardware India's air force has never built domestically. Bids stay open until October 20, with a pre-bid meeting scheduled for September 24 to let interested companies work through the technical requirements before submission, a process that follows an earlier Request for Information DRDO had circulated to gauge industry interest before committing to a formal tender.

What a refuelling pod actually replaces

Air-to-air refuelling pods are the equipment that lets a conventional aircraft — not a dedicated tanker — top up other jets mid-air, extending range and loiter time without needing a purpose-built tanker fleet in the air at the same time. India currently depends on Russian-origin Il-78 tankers for this role, aircraft that have been dogged for years by serviceability problems severe enough that India has had to lease additional tanker capacity from foreign operators to cover the resulting gaps in coverage.

The AARP DRDO wants built is modular by design: a standard tanker configuration would carry up to three pods, two mounted under the wings and an optional third on the fuselage, effectively converting other aircraft into flexible refuelling platforms rather than relying on a small, dedicated tanker fleet that has to be available, serviceable and in the right place at the right time. That modularity is the point — it's meant to spread refuelling capability across more of the existing fleet instead of concentrating it in a handful of aircraft that have proven difficult to keep operationally ready.

Indigenous, deliberately, this time

The project runs in parallel with — but is structurally different from — ongoing efforts by HAL and Israel Aerospace Industries to convert Boeing commercial aircraft into inflight-refuelling tankers for the Indian Air Force, a programme aimed at replacing the ageing Il-78 fleet outright. Where that programme still depends on foreign integration work layered onto a commercial airframe, the AARP tender is explicit that DRDO wants a fully indigenous pod, developed and owned domestically rather than assembled under license from a foreign design house. The two efforts are complementary rather than competing: even a new tanker fleet still needs refuelling pods to actually transfer fuel, and building those pods domestically closes a dependency that a new airframe alone would not.

For India's private defence-industrial base, an RFP is an earlier and lower-profile milestone than a contract award or a flight trial — there is no hardware yet, and won't be for some time. But it's also the point at which a real budget line and a real technical specification exist for a capability gap that has been publicly acknowledged for years, turning a known problem into a fundable one that private industry can actually bid to solve, rather than waiting for a government-to-government deal to close it from abroad.

What determines whether this works

Whether Indian industry can deliver a pod that performs to Il-78-equivalent standards by the time bids close in October, and whether DRDO's Technology Development Fund process moves from tender to contract to flight-cleared hardware on a realistic timeline, will determine how much this indigenous push actually reduces the Air Force's reliance on both its ageing Russian tankers and the stopgap foreign leases it has had to fall back on in the meantime. It's a slower, less dramatic story than a missile test, but it targets a dependency that has quietly constrained Indian air power for years.

Sources

• India Launches Bid For Indigenous Air-To-Air Refuelling Pod Development — Indian Defence News
• DRDO Issues RFP to develop Air-to-Air Refueling Pod for Inflight Refueling Aircraft — idrw.org
• India's DRDO Initiates Development of Indigenous Air-to-Air Refuelling Pods to Enhance IAF Capabilities — SSBCrackExams
• India Will Lease Tankers to Overcome Il-78MKI Midas Serviceability Issues — The Aviationist