By VIVEK RAGHUVANSHI
NEW DELHI — After contracting 75 basic trainer aircraft from Pilatus in 2012, the Indian Ministry of Defence wants to buy an additional 106 that would be license-built by a domestic company.
But domestic defense firms find the proposal uneconomical, and state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) is pushing its own homegrown basic trainer, though the Indian Air Force has already rejected it.
The request for information, described by the defense industry as the first of its kind, asks selected domestic companies if they would participate in the proposed $1.2 billion program to build 106 Pilatus PC-7 Mark-II trainers under license from the Swiss company in the “Buy and Make (Indian)” category, which restricts contracts to domestic defense companies and requires that at least half of the components and subsystems come from domestic sources.
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