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Chandigarh: The hoary French adage, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – the more things change, the more they remain the same – could well have been coined for the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) perpetually circular combat aircraft procurement process.

Barely a decade after abandoning the original deal for 126 twin-engine Dassault Rafale fighters under the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is believed to have finalised a Letter of Request (LoR) to France for the acquisition of 114 of the same aircraft type for the IAF. This, in effect, is tantamount to reviving the fighter procurement that was earlier shelved without a clear explanation and is now reintroduced under the rebranded Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) programme launched in 2017-18. 

According to a report published in The Indian Express on Monday (May 25), this LoR is likely to be dispatched “very soon” to Paris as part of an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) through which the 114 Rafale fighter deal would eventually be processed.

In accordance with the MRFA project, 90 of these 114 Rafales are to be series-built in India through a collaborative venture between Dassault Aviation and a yet-to-be-identified domestic Strategic Partner (SP), while the remaining 24 are to be acquired in flyaway condition. The MoD’s Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) had earlier approved this MRFA proposal in February, formally setting the Rafale acquisition in motion via the government-to-government (G2G) IGA mechanism.

Once France responds to the LoR, the MoD is expected to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) or formal tender for the 114 fighters, paving the way for commercial negotiations and subsequent approval by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), headed by the prime minister. The entire fighter acquisition process is expected to culminate in a contract by year-end, IE report optimistically noted, a timeline with which industry officials strongly disagreed.

The irony of the proposed deal, however, lies not merely in the return of the same F3R fighter type to the procurement cycle but in the stark inversion of cost, scale, and ambition that now defines the entire MRFA project as compared to the earlier 2007-08 MMRCA tender.

For what was earlier envisaged as a $10–12 billion MMRCA programme for 126 Rafales, with extensive industrial participation and technology transfer to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for local manufacture of 108 aircraft, has effectively been reconfigured in scope and structure.

Also read: Back-to-Back RAF F-35B Groundings Raise Questions About Reliability of NATO’s Top Fighter

Eight years after being scrapped by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) Union government in 2016, it has re-emerged as a $40 billion acquisition for........

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