₹6,000 Crore and 1,000 Jobs Fly Past Tamil Nadu: Embraer–Mahindra Pick Nagpur for C-390 Assembly

Another marquee industrial prize has slipped through Tamil Nadu's fingers. On October 1, Brazilian planemaker Embraer and the Mahindra Group announced they had identified Nagpur, Maharashtra, as the location for a potential final assembly line for the C-390 Millennium military transport aircraft — a project the Maharashtra government says would bring ₹6,000 crore in investment and 1,000 direct jobs. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding with the Maharashtra government at its Invest Maharashtra event, locking in the state's pitch before the Indian Air Force has even chosen its Medium Transport Aircraft. The IAF programme aims to replace the ageing AN-32 and IL-76 fleets, and India is expected to order between 60 and 80 aircraft — one of the largest military transport tenders in the world. Embraer and Mahindra have been courting New Delhi since February 2024, when they signed their first agreement to offer the C-390 to the IAF. A strategic cooperation pact followed in October 2025, an MRO base location was shortlisted in February this year, and now the assembly line site is fixed — contingent on the C-390 winning the tender against Lockheed Martin's C-130J, which is being offered with the Tata group. The question Tamil Nadu must ask is a blunt one: where was its bid? The state hosts one of only two defence industrial corridors in the country, with nodes at Chennai, Coimbatore, Hosur, Salem and Tiruchirappalli, built precisely to attract projects like this. Yet when a ₹6,000-crore aerospace ecosystem went looking for a home, Maharashtra moved first, signed the MoU, and took the headline. This is not the first time. Big-ticket manufacturing investments have repeatedly chosen other states in recent years, each announcement carrying the same sting: jobs, supply chains and technology clusters that could have anchored themselves in Tamil Nadu landing elsewhere. The TVK government, still finding its feet on industrial policy, has offered no public account of what Tamil Nadu put on the table for the C-390 project — or whether it put anything on the table at all. To be fair, the Nagpur facility exists only on paper for now. It is, in Embraer's own words, "subject to the C-390 Millennium being selected" and to an actual IAF order. But industrial prizes are won long before the final contract is signed — in the quiet months of site visits, incentive packages and government-to-government courtship. Maharashtra understood that. Tamil Nadu, it appears, was not even in the room. One thousand jobs. Six thousand crore. A full aerospace supply chain. Gone to Nagpur — while Tamil Nadu's defence corridor waits for a headline of its own.