The US is steadily muscling into the lucrative Indian defence market, giving jitters to traditional arms suppliers like Russia, Israel, France and the UK. Having already notched up arms sales worth $8 billion to India in the last few years despite continuing problems over transfer of “sensitive” technology, it’s aiming to corner much more with the Obama-II administration now taking charge in Washington.
The huge interest in India, which will spend over $100 billion in acquiring weapon systems over the next decade, is evident from the fact that as many as 67 American armament and aviation companies will be hawking their wares in the 9th edition of Aero-India to be held in Bangalore from February 6 to 10.
Indian defence production secretary R K Mathur on Monday said 607 companies, including 352 foreign ones, and 78 official delegations from various countries have already confirmed their participation in the air-show that would be “bigger and better” than the previous editions.
After the US companies, the largest participation will be from France with 49 firms, followed by the UK (33), Russia (29), Germany (22), Israel (18) and Belgium (16).
