Plane and simple: US, Russia out of India’s $12-billion fighter aircraft deal

New Delhi, Bangalore : The Indian defence ministry has short-listed the Eurofighter Typhoon and French Dassault Aviation Rafale for the $12 billion 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) deal, effectively showing the door to the Americans, Russians and Swedes from the fierce competition.
Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Aviation Rafale have been asked to extend the validity of their commercial bids till December 31. The bids of all six contenders expired on Thursday.
The ministry of defence (MoD) sent out letters on April 26 to all six competing vendors – US’ Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet IN and Lockheed Martin’s F-16IN Super Viper, Gripen’s Next Generation (NG) from Sweden’s Saab, European consortium EADS’ Eurofighter Typhoon, French Rafale from Dassault Aviation and the Russian MiG-35 – while asking only the two short-listed companies for further negotiations.
An MoD source said the rejection of the four contenders was on technical grounds and that the commercial bids of both the short-listed companies would now be opened. Whoever is finally selected will be retained for further price negotiations, as per the seventh and eighth steps of India’s Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) under the defence ministry. Benchmarking of prices is being done now, after which the final decision will be taken.
The offset negotiations are still on. The offset policy mandates foreign company from who defence ware is being procured to invest 30% of the deal cost in any Indian defence company to encourage foreign collaboration and boost the business among private Indian defence firms. The latest developments over India’s MMRCA hunt have understandably miffed the US.
29/04/11 Daily News & Analysis

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2011, Indian Aviation- In General Apr 2011