India will not veer from its decision to award a 12-billion-dollar contract to France for Rafale fighter planes, the Indian Air Force chief of staff said in an interview published online. “We have a procedure as per the defence procurement policy that stipulates the contract goes to the lowest bidder,” Marshal Norman Anil Kumar Browne told the US monthly Aviation International News at the Singapore Airshow.
India chose Dassault Aviation’s Rafale plane over the Typhoon built by Eurofighter, a consortium made up of British group BAE Sytems, Europe’s EADS and Italy’s Finmeccanica. Browne added in the interview posted on Thursday that they have begun negotiations to finalise the contract for 126 planes and that any decision now to involve another manufacturer would be “procedurally untenable”.
