Ahead of Modi's visit, India set to buy choppers worth $3bn from US

The finance ministry has finally given a green signal to acquisition of 22 Apache attack and 15 Chinook heavy deployment helicopters worth $3.1 billion from US defence major Boeing after a delay of nearly three years and 13 price extensions.

Updated on: Sep 19, 2015, 11:19:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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The finance ministry has finally given a green signal to acquisition of 22 Apache attack and 15 Chinook heavy deployment helicopters worth $3.1 billion from US defence major Boeing after a delay of nearly three years and 13 price extensions.

India is set to acquire 22 Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. (Photo: US Army)

The deal is expected to cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) next Tuesday, before Prime Minister Narendra Modi embarks on his United Nations General Assembly visit to New York.

With Boeing and US Army Security Assistance Command threatening to escalate the price after September 30 by nearly 40% after holding it steady since 2009, finance minister Arun Jaitley, defence minister Manohar Parrikar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval put their heads together this week.

“We have conveyed our no objections to the deal being considered by the CCS,” said a senior finance ministry official.

India plans to purchase 22 Apache AH 64D Longbow helicopters with purchase option of another 11 at the cost of $2 billion. This state-of-the-art attack helicopter will be acquired with Hell Fire missiles and around 8,000 rockets.

The helicopter has night vision capability, stealth characteristics and beyond visual range missiles.

Apart from this, India will acquire 15 CH-47 Chinook helicopters with options of another six at the cost of $1.1 billion. A twin-rotor helicopter, Chinook has proved its worth in US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be used by Indian Air Force for rapid insertion of troops in high altitude areas.

India has vintage attack and heavy deployment helicopters only on paper.

The acquisition process of the two helicopters was started in 2009 and was expected to be completed by December 2012. However, due to bureaucratic delays both in the defence ministry and finance ministry, the acquisition has been virtually hanging fire since 2013, following completion of all negotiations.

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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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