English
New Delhi, September 21: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on Wednesday cleared the 36 Rafale fighter deal, the negotiations for which had been going on for quite some time. The fighter jets have been manufactured by France’s Dassault Aviation SA, and will be added to the country’s Air Force fleet with the aim to modernize it. A Cabinet Committee, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and including Union Defence, Finance and Foreign Ministers too, held a meeting on Wednesday to finalise the deal worth 8 billion euros ($8.9 billion). The deal will be signed later this week in New Delhi, in the presence of the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian.
According to a report in the Economic Times, Jean-Yves Le Drian will arrive in India tomorrow, along with the CEO of the manufacturing Dassault Aviation SA, Thales and MBDA, to finalize the much-awaited deal. A French “working team” is already in town and is working with their own translators on the contract, which runs into thousands of pages, with their Indian counterparts. The deal has been finalized after months of negotiations which began in January this year. India negotiated a price reduction of Euro 590 million on the deal. The deal would have been fanalized earlier, had not India wanted to seal it at a better price. ALSO READ: French have marginally reduced Rafale price: Government sources
The 36 Rafale fighter jets were going to be a huge burden on the country’s treasury, but for the timely intervention of Narendra Modi, who through diplomatic strategies, convinced France for a 50 per cent offset clause. India’s hunt for new planes to keep pace with the defence upgrades of its neighbors China and Pakistan, is what lead it to sign the deal with France, for the acquisition of the state-of-the-art fighter jets. India began negotiating with the Paris-based defence manufacturer in 2012 and it had originally planned to have 126 warplanes built at an estimated cost of about $11 billion. However, talks stalled over prices and if it were not for Modi’s intervention and his tactics to speed things last year, it would still be in the pipeline.
FLASH: Rafale deal cleared, to be inked on 23 September.
— ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016
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