Union Budget 2026 scraps customs duty on aircraft components, boosting Adani and HAL passenger plane plans

Plans by the Adani Group and state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) to produce passenger planes in the country got a major boost with the budget scrapping basic customs duty on components used in the manufacture of civilian aircraft in the country.

HAL is aiming to partner Russia's Sukhoi to make the SJ-100, a regional aircraft, within the next three years, while Adani has tied up with Brazil's Embraer to assemble a regional aircraft in India. Setting up aircraft manufacturing lines requires large scale imports of components and spares, which till now attracted basic customs duty of 2.5-10%.

This has been completely waived off in the budget.


The budget also announced a scheme to support local manufacturing of seaplanes. HAL CMD DK Sunil said last week that the company is manufacturing an aqua version of the Hindustan-228 aircraft.

He said the company's transport aircraft division at Kanpur will be implementing the programme with the prototype expected to be ready within a year for starting flight trials.

Sunil also said HAL has prepared a plan to grow the share of commercial business in revenue to 25% in 10 years from 5% currently.