Having woken up to the progress made by countries like China in developing indigenous engines for military aircraft late, the Union government has directed the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to fast-track the ‘Kaveri’ engine project conceived as the power plant for the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA). Much of the criticism for LCA Tejas can be contributed to Kaveri engine. The indigenous engine development somesaulted many target dates, that it was finally jettisoned from the LCAs project officially in september,2008 and is generally written off as a 25-year, Rs. 2,100-crore drain on resources. But now it looks set to resume where it left off two years ago and complete the last lap of its development. GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment , a lab under the DRDO in Bangalore is the developer of the kaveri engine) is now running two separate successor engine programmes, the K9+ programme and the K10 programme.