MRO: Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul

Imagine a car that, unlike an ordinary vehicle serviced whenever convenient, is legally forbidden from being driven at all unless it has passed a rigorous, precisely scheduled inspection and maintenance regime, checked and re-checked on a fixed calendar regardless of how well it seems to be running. Every commercial aircraft operates under almost exactly this discipline, and MRO, Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul, is the entire industry built around keeping that discipline running.

MRO covers everything required to keep an aircraft airworthy over its operating life, routine scheduled inspections, engine overhauls, component repairs and replacement, and the extensive documentation regulators require proving every requirement was actually met on schedule. Unlike most consumer maintenance, aircraft MRO is not optional or deferrable, an aircraft simply cannot legally fly once it falls outside its maintenance schedule.

India's MRO market has historically been smaller than its fleet size alone would suggest, with a meaningful share of Indian carriers' maintenance work, engine overhauls especially, sent overseas to established MRO hubs rather than performed domestically, partly a legacy of tax treatment that made foreign MRO work cheaper than doing the same work in India.

That gap is now closing rapidly. India's MRO market is projected to grow from roughly Rs 38,350 crore in 2025 to Rs 53,392 crore by 2030, and fiscal 2026 alone saw domestic MRO revenue grow roughly 50% over fiscal 2024, a direct consequence of both India's fast-expanding fleet, IndiGo, Air India and Akasa together are expected to operate over 1,200 aircraft by 2030, and deliberate policy changes making domestic MRO more tax-competitive against sending the same work abroad.

Whenever an Indian airline announces a new domestic MRO facility investment rather than continuing to rely on overseas maintenance providers, that decision reflects this exact shift, a fast-growing fleet finally making domestic maintenance capacity, and improved tax treatment finally making it commercially attractive, worth building at home rather than exporting to established maintenance hubs elsewhere.