Long-stalled contract: India signs deal for 36 French fighter jets

First ready-to-fly Rafales expected to arrive by 2019; order to be completed within six years


Reuters September 24, 2016
India had originally awarded Dassault with an order for 126 Rafales in 2012, but subsequent talks collapsed. PHOTO: AFP

NEW DELHI: India signed a deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets from France on Friday for around $8.7 billion, the country’s first major acquisition of combat planes in two decades and a boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to rebuild an ageing fleet.

France’s Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian signed the agreement with his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, in New Delhi, ending almost 18 months of wrangling over terms between New Delhi and manufacturer Dassault Aviation.

Parrikar said the deal, which a defence ministry official said was valued at 7.8 billion euros ($8.7 billion), would “significantly improve India’s strike and defence capabilities.”

Indian air force officials have warned for years of a major capability gap opening up with China and Pakistan without new state-of-the-art planes. The force is down to 33 squadrons, against its requirement of 45 to face both China and Pakistan.

India had originally awarded Dassault with an order for 126 Rafales in 2012, but subsequent talks collapsed. Modi personally intervened in April 2015 to agree on the smaller order of 36 and give the air force a near-term boost as he weighed options for a more fundamental overhaul.

The first ready-to-fly Rafales are expected to arrive by 2019 and India is set to have all 36 within six years.

Defence analyst Nitin Gokhale told Reuters that the price tag was fair and that India had negotiated it down from 12 billion euros. Dassault said in a statement it welcomed the contract signing.

India says its locally made Tejas fighter, which took to the skies in July 33 years after it was cleared for development, will form a major part of its future fleet, but Parrikar has also said that India needed 100 new light combat aircraft by 2020 to replace Russian MiG-21s. That has encouraged the likes of Sweden’s Saab and US Lockheed Martin to re-pitch their single-engine Gripen and F-16 planes that were eliminated in the Rafale tender.

“The Rafale is filling up one critical gap. It’s not the whole envelope,” Gokhale said. “Once this is over, the government will get down to business to assess the proposals.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2016.

COMMENTS (1)

Bunny Rabbit | 7 years ago | Reply Welcome move . I hope a small portion of this is spent in actual edu/ aware ness / upliftment of its general public
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