Why India Keeps Returning to Defence Weapons It Spent Years Rejecting |
Listen to this article:
Chandigarh: If there is one enduring feature of India’s defence procurement, it is the tendency of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the armed services to spend years deciding what they do not want, only to return years later in pursuit of precisely the same solution.
This cycle has repeated itself often enough to qualify as an informal institutional doctrine.
Materiel acquisition programmes are launched, evaluated, debated, cancelled, and abandoned, only to be resurrected years later under a new acronym, a revised requirement, or a different political dispensation. In the process, years are lost, capability gaps widen, and costs invariably rise to levels that become increasingly difficult to financially sustain.
The clearest illustration of this tendency is the 2007 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition, which sought 126 fighters for the Indian Air Force (IAF), and stretched over nearly a decade of trials, evaluations and negotiations.
Six aircraft were evaluated, two were shortlisted, and in 2012, France’s twin-engine Rafale emerged as the winner. The programme was initially valued at around $10–12 billion, with 108 aircraft slated for indigenous manufacture by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) under a transfer-of-technology arrangement.
After years of protracted negotiations over costs, liability, work share, and production responsibilities between Dassault Aviation and HAL, the entire exercise unravelled. Governments changed, priorities shifted, and the MMRCA programme was ultimately abandoned. Instead, the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) government signed an inter-governmental agreement (IGA) with France in 2016 for 36 Rafales in flyaway condition for around Rs 58,000 crore, all of which were delivered by 2022.
But the Rafale story did not end there.
In April 2025, India signed a Rs 63,000-crore agreement with France for 26 Rafale Marine fighters for deployment aboard INS Vikrant, the indigenously designed and built aircraft carrier, deepening its commitment to the very aircraft that had emerged victorious in the original MMRCA competition.
The irony, however, was striking: a programme conceived around the local manufacture of 108 Rafales ended with every one of the 62 replacement aircraft being imported in fully built, flyaway condition from France at enhanced cost, with no local manufacturing footprint and no meaningful transfer of skills or capability to the domestic ecosystem.
Subsequently, 19 years after the MMRCA tender was launched, the MoD issued a Letter of Request to France in late May 2026 for 114 Rafale fighters under the Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) programme. Valued at an estimated Rs 3.23 lakh crore, or roughly $39 billion – nearly four times the cost of the original MMRCA proposal – the acquisition envisages 90–94 aircraft being manufactured in India by a Strategic Partner, with the remainder imported, closely mirroring the original MMRCA framework.
Or, in other words, after years spent selecting the Rafale, negotiating for it, and then abandoning it, the IAF ended up returning, once again to France, seeking essentially the same aircraft in slightly smaller numbers, under a remarkably similar manufacturing arrangement – but at a higher cost. In short, the acronym had changed; the requirement had not.
An equally striking example concerns the nearly three-decade-old Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft........