Cabinet committee set to clear Rafale fighter jet deal today

NEW DELHI: Sixteen months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter aircraft, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) is set

Published on: Sep 12, 2016, 05:55:29 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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NEW DELHI: Sixteen months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter aircraft, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) is set to approve on Monday the closure of negotiations between the defence ministry and French manufacturer Dassault Aviation. The settled price for the twin-engined multi-role fighter is about 7.8 billion Euros with deliveries from 2019 and annual inflation capped at 3.5 per cent.

Top sources told Hindustan Times that the defence ministry has sent the finalised deal to the CCS after making requisite changes to its offset section. The deal involves the manufacturer outsourcing 50 per cent of the total amount of the deal from India.

“The cost of 36 fighters will be around Rs 7000-8,000 crore lower than that what was being offered to the previous UPA regime in the now cancelled contract for multi-role medium range combat aircraft (MMRCA). Rafale had been shortlisted as the lowest bidder in the MMRCA tender,” said a senior official.

Since Modi ordered 36 ready-to-fly fighters from France in April 2015, both the defence ministry and Dassault Aviation officials have been involved in hectic negotiations with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar insistent that the cost should be 10-20 per cent less than what was being offered to UPA regime but without compromising on the capabilities of the aircraft. Equipped with a state-of-the-art AESA radar that allows for multiple targeting beyond visual range, the nuclear capable jet will the front-line jet for Indian Air Force (IAF) with Russian Su-30 MKI forming the backbone. Rafale fighters can be armed with the latest air-to-air, air-to-ground, as well as nuclear armament.

The 36 aircraft with a full armament complement were offered at a maximum price of 11.6 billion euros with annual inflation pegged at 5 per cent. This has been brought down to 7.8 billion euros with maximum inflation pegged at 3.5.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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