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The most important prop in Netflix series “Operation Safed Sagar” isn’t a fighter jet. It’s a wing badge.
When creator and showrunner Abhijeet Singh Parmar first sat down with Alka Ahuja – widow of Squadron Leader Ajay
Ahuja, who was killed in the 1999 Kargil War – he and his team arrived with a list of some 70 to 100 questions. They asked none of them. Every wall of her home was, in his words, a museum to her husband: a medal here, a trophy there, a photograph on every surface. All the team could offer was an open invitation for her to speak.
“All we asked her was, ‘Ma’am, whatever you want to tell us about sir,'” Parmar says. What she told them became part of “Operation Safed Sagar,” and Ahuja later entrusted the production with her husband’s original wing badge, now worn on screen by star Siddharth. “I know that rather than having just a very good story to tell, this is also a huge responsibility in someone’s real life,” Parmar adds.
That gesture of trust threads through Netflix India’s six-episode series, which premiered on Thursday at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi ahead of its Friday streaming release. Created and showrun by Parmar and Kushal Srivastava, directed by Oni Sen and produced by Matchbox Shots LLP and Feel Good Films, the show follows a brotherhood of fighter pilots and the political maneuvering behind enemy lines as India mounts what became the world’s highest air operation. It dramatizes the Indian Air Force’s role in the Kargil War, the 1999 conflict fought in the high-altitude Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir after Pakistani soldiers and militants crossed the Line of Control and occupied positions on the Indian side, a chapter Netflix says has rarely been explored on screen given that most prior portrayals centered on the Army.
Speaking at the premiere, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos framed the series as an emblem of the streamer’s decade in the country, tying its scale to a broader economic case for local production. He said the show contributed more than $24 million to the Indian economy, with VFX and creative-tech work alone accounting for more than $5 million, or roughly 20% of the total.
“Behind every episode are thousands of people whose creativity, skill and dedication make that story possible,” Sarandos said. “The scale of this series and the production demonstrates that India today has the talent, the technical expertise and the production capabilities to create entertainment that stands confidently alongside the very best in the world.” He added that the milestone extends “The Netflix Effect” the company has tracked across its Indian slate for 10 years.
The series’ key cast includes Siddharth, Jimmy Shergill, Abhay Verma, Dia Mirza, Prajakta Koli, Adil Hussain, Mihir Ahuja, Taaruk Raina, Arnav Bhasin and Amrita Bagchi, with a score featuring composers Amit Trivedi, Vishal Dadlani, Supinwal Singh and Anurag Saikya.
“There are times when you choose a story, and there are times when the story chooses you,” Parmar says of how “Operation Safed Sagar” came together. The project began, he says, over cups of tea. Srivastava, his co-creator, served in the Air Force for six years after the Kargil War and brought Parmar story after story the writer had never encountered in his own research: “Bounce,” a house entry ritual in which junior officers could demand a meal from a senior’s home at any hour; a fighter pilot’s wife who saved her arguments for the weekend so her husband could fly without distraction; a 22-year-old MiG-21 pilot who didn’t know how to ride a scooter. “It was this very Indian world, a very grounded air force, rather than just the dashing fighter pilots that we see,” Parmar says. Srivastava initially wanted to make the story as a film; Parmar pushed for a series, despite neither of them having produced anything at that scale before. He turned Srivastava’s account into a 200-page pitch and sent it to Netflix India director of series Tanya Bami, expecting a pass. “To be very, very honest, I myself was very terrified when I saw these 200 pages,” Parmar says. Bami and the creative team came back with a greenlight in two weeks.
To execute it, Parmar brought on producers from Matchbox Shots and requested a two- to three-week research recce to the real bases and the Kargil Valley before writing began, along with a crew chosen as much for its sensitivity to the human material as its ability to handle scale. That search led him to director Sen, an advertising filmmaker who told Parmar he had never directed a car commercial because “it’s only machines,” and that what drew him to “Operation Safed Sagar” was its human core. The recce reshaped the writing, too: Parmar says it convinced him to break the sprawling material into modules, each functioning as something close to its own mini-series.
Authenticity became the production’s organizing principle from there. “For us, authenticity was never optional. It was the foundation of this project,” Bami says. It’s the first Indian streaming production to film across active Indian Air Force bases, according to Netflix, shooting at Nal, Chandigarh, Madh Island in Mumbai and Gwalior, with access to operational MiG-21s and Mirage 2000 aircraft – likely the last unit to have filmed with the MiG-21s before their retirement. The team filmed at altitudes nearing 16,000 feet in Himachal Pradesh, at locations including the Shinku-La Pass, Jispa, Sissu and Rohtang, as well as the Drass Army base, to approximate conditions near the 18,000-foot heights where the war was fought.
The series takes its title from the Air Force’s real operation name for the Kargil campaign; according to Parmar, fighter pilots looking down from those altitudes at the captured peaks described seeing an ocean of snow. Parmar says the production initially considered faking the conditions before abandoning the idea entirely. “We started doing deep research on where can the fake snow come from,” he says. “And one day, we were in a very deep discussion in our conference room saying which snow will give us the best texture. One person from the team said, ‘But what about the vapor that comes from it?'” That question, he says, spiraled into a recognition that nothing but the real altitude would capture how the actors would look and move, and the production ultimately shot at 13,000 to 16,000 feet with oxygen cylinders and ambulances on standby.
Some 50 to 60 Indian Air Force and Golden Arrow Squadron veterans were consulted, including former Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa, and two former Air Force officers stayed on set throughout the shoot to oversee protocol, salutes and uniform detail, including tailoring that Netflix says was handled by Air Force tailors. “Even these small patches that you see on this uniform, they were actually built from actual Air Force vendors,” Parmar says. Group Captain Tarun Kumar Singha was involved from the earliest stages of story development, while Group Captain Alok Chaudhary coached the cast on cockpit body language and military bearing, uniform protocol and radio terminology. “Their excitement of having their first story being told at its authentic level is very high,” Bami says. “It’s been a deep, exciting collaboration.”
Recreating the aerial combat required a comparable investment behind the camera. Netflix India director of production Ankit Gokani, who calls it the most ambitious show the platform has made in its 10 years in the country, says the series includes more than 50 minutes of flying sequences, developed first through more than a year of pre-visualization with over 10 vendors.
“The idea to do pre-visualization was really not to figure out just the tech part of it,” Gokani says. “The goal was, because a show like this is very technical to shoot, we didn’t want Abhijeet and Oni to be really figuring out how to get the technical stuff right on set, and instead concentrate on the actors because the heart of it is a human story, which we are looking to do.”
To get cockpit performances right, the production built a custom 2.7-tonne, six-degree-of-freedom motion base with MergeXR, shipped from Amsterdam, marking the first deployment of its kind in India. The rig was synced to an Unreal Engine pre-visualization pipeline, allowing actors to physically feel banks, dives and climbs that matched what would later appear on screen, with live compositing on set giving the director and cinematographer a real-time preview of the finished shot. “I still remember the first four days when the actors were just going through the simulations … the shock on their face because it felt very real for them,” Gokani says. The workflow cut cockpit filming from an estimated 30 days to 15. Gokani says visiting Air Force personnel mistook the constructed cockpit set for the real thing.
The scale extended to the production’s footprint. Filming ran 115 days across 11 cities, including Patiala, Gwalior, Chandigarh and Bikaner, encompassing more than 100 locations, 190 speaking parts and temperatures ranging from minus 20 to over 40 degrees Celsius. “Getting people to feel the story and not get taken out of that experience was the toughest part for us,” Gokani says of the cockpit work in particular, adding that mounting a crew of more than 300 people safely at altitude “was a challenge on its own.” Netflix says the series engaged 850 local businesses, more than 200 cast and crew, and 4,000 daily hires, and worked with 12 to 15 Indian VFX studios, including yFX, Phantom FX, Atomic Arts, ZebuFX and NAC Studio, employing between 1,200 and 1,500 artists across Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai. Bami says the production deliberately kept the work in India rather than outsourcing it, building a first-of-its-kind VFX editor workshop, a custom color pipeline with local partners, and embedding an international VFX supervisor full time for more than two years to transfer expertise to Indian artists. She says the studio previewed a clip for Netflix leadership in Los Angeles earlier this year as an early test of how the material would land outside India.
Netflix frames the series as a marker of its 10th year operating in India, tracing a line back to “Sacred Games,” the platform’s first Indian commissioned series, through titles including “Heeramandi,” “Delhi Crime,” “Kohrra,” “The Ba***ds of Bollywood” and “Taskaree.” “Every time we’ve really taken a bet on a distinct idea, on a new world, on a distinctive storytelling style, it’s something that the audiences have always been intrigued and curious about,” Bami says.
“Dhurandhar” is the Aditya Dhar-directed Bollywood spy thriller starring Ranveer Singh as an undercover Indian agent infiltrating a criminal network in Karachi, a film largely set across the border in Pakistan. It became a worldwide box office hit before moving to Netflix, where it topped the platform’s chart in India and, notably, in Pakistan as well, holding the top spot there for weeks. That crossover came despite decades of tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, including three wars and a long-running dispute over Kashmir – the same fault line at the center of “Operation Safed Sagar.”
When asked how “Operation Safed Sagar” might land in Pakistan, Bami didn’t predict a specific reaction, pointing instead to the platform’s broader history of cross-border viewership. “As with all our stories, our focus is on telling compelling human stories through the lens of the people at the heart of them,” Bami says. “A lot of our titles are watched all over the world and they’ll hopefully resonate with this story, and they’ll engage with it. It’s a story of people, and it’s a story of the truth of those people. … Korean content is watched in India. Indian content is watched all over Asia and beyond. So I’m sure a story of this magnitude will be watched all over.”
Parmar says he tried to stay faithful to the emotional throughline of the real Air Force officers and families he researched even where the show’s timeline required dramatic compression. “The focus in this story is the emotional growth of these characters that I’ve built,” he says. “But of course, some of the parts just didn’t fit into one timeline.”
“Operation Safed Sagar” begins streaming globally on Netflix Aug. 7.
