Govt to approve 26 Rafale-M’s purchase

Modi government to approve acquisition of 26 Rafale-M fighters and submarines, boosting India's naval strength amid regional tensions.

Published on: Apr 5, 2025, 06:54:17 IST

By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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The Narendra Modi government is all set to greenlight the acquisition of 26 Rafale-Maritime strike fighters this month, continuing the trend of increased capital spending on defence equipment. In 2024-25, the NDA government spent in excess of ₹2 lakh crore on this.

HT learns that the $7.6 billion fighter jet deal is all set to go before the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) later this month and will be followed by government approval for three additional diesel electric submarines after all the stakeholders are brought on the same page. The Rafale-M fighters will be used to give more teeth to the Indian Navy at sea onboard India’s two aircraft carriers, while the additional submarines will strengthen conventional deterrence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

The defence ministry signed 193 contracts in 2024-2025 with an outlay of ₹209059.85 crore as compared to 192 contracts worth ₹104855.92 crore in 2023-2024. Since the Narendra Modi government took office in 2014, the ministry has signed 1096 contracts worth nearly ₹10 ( ₹946225.48) lakh crore.

The numbers showed that that capital expenditure touched a peak in 2024-2025 with no surrender of any funds as compared to the previous four years. In 2020-2021, the ministry surrendered funds of ₹205 crore, in 2021-2022, ₹863 and in 2022-2023, ₹7055.99 crore. Even in 2023-24, the ministry surrendered ₹2971.97 crore. Simply put, while the Modi government was allocating significant funds for capital outlay, the defence ministry could not spend the amount, leading to lower revised estimates.

With India’s neighbours, particularly China upgrading border infrastructure all along the 3488 km LAC (line of actual control) and countries in the Indian sub-continent showing signs of serious political and financial stress, the Modi government has decided to give top priority to military capacity building with focus on ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat.’ It is understood that top officials have been given the task of project management and accountability for indigenous capacity building by making Defence PSUs such as HAL and BEL more answerable and timeline-conscious. DRDO has also been told firmly that the nation cannot wait for never ending testing of hardware platforms given that the global instability is going to be the norm in the near future.

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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