By N C Bipindra
NEW DELHI: India’s most awaited defence deal for 126 combat planes, expected to be worth nearly `1 lakh crore, may take longer than expected to materialize.
Just over a month after the Modi government got into the saddle, it has now emerged that the Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender for which India selected the French Rafale aircraft from the Dassault Aviation stable is still in the works and would take at least another six months to be ready.
However, even readying all papers by December this year would be no guarantee that the contract would be signed within the current fiscal that ends on March 31, 2015, say senior bureaucrats in the Defence Ministry. “The signing may not even happen within this financial year,’’ a top bureaucrat said, noting there were at least three reasons due to which the seven-year-old tender had not materialized into a successful deal.
It has been more than two years, since Rafale beat its closest competitor Eurofighter Typhoon from the consortium then called EADS Cassidian. When French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in Delhi last week, the Indian response to his efforts to push the deal through was lukewarm, say officials.
Read the full story at The Sunday Standard