 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We are going to discuss with D. Raghunandan who has been following the issue of the aircraft acquisitions that has been going on for some quite some years now which has ended with the 36 Rafale aircraft being bought. There has been now a controversy about it, Congress has raised issues regarding how this has been done, at what price this has been done and so on. But this has been a matter of controversy for quite some time. Raghunandan, we have talked about it in NewsClick itself when this 36 aircraft was suddenly decided during payable this visit to Paris and we had said that this seems to be a very startling development considering the long process, the fixing of what our needs were, what kind of aircraft we wanted and suddenly this discussion the decision to buy 36 of Rafale aircraft not 1 to 26, not transfer of technology. Is there anything which has come out in Nirmala Sitaraman's statement which throws some more light on this? Unfortunately not. Raksha Mantri has basically said that all procedures were followed in taking this decision. How they were followed? Which committee has decided what based on inputs from home unknown? So, there is complete opacity in this, there is no transparency at all because every other day even the Air Force Chief who has somehow pressurized to come out in defense of this Rafale deal is lamenting the fact that we have got only 36 of these aircraft. We require much more, the squadron strength is highly depleted. India went through a prolonged process of discussion and deliberations, inputs from all stakeholders including the user agency, the Indian Air Force, the bureaucracy and the political leadership to come to a decision that India required medium weight or twin-engined aircraft and required about 126 of these aircraft. In fact, the original tender which India had floated was for multi-role combat aircraft in which everybody had applied including the F-16, the Gripen, they are all single engine fighters, the MiG-35, but then the committee sat down in India and said no, our requirement based on the IAF's needs and where our Air Force strength is and weaknesses are, we require twin-engined aircraft. Suddenly, this decision was taken not to buy 126, but to buy 36. Nirmala Sitaraman made the point that we did this because our government believes in decisive action and we took a decision because the Air Force desperately needed some aircraft, but the Air Force says it desperately needs 126 aircraft. So, I find this strange that a system has been set up for defense procurement keeping the user agency's needs in mind, that seems to have been given the go-by and now that is being praised as effective decision making. It may have been quick decision making, but it has certainly not been effective and I don't think it keeps India's long-term interests in mind, both in terms of the defense requirements and the requirements of technology. You raised the issue of transfer of technology. In this particular case, there is no transfer of technology involved, that is the first time the defense minister has explicitly said no transfer of technology is involved. That's absolutely right. And as you said, this is the first time this has been openly admitted, those who know the aviation industry would know that if an agency, if a foreign equipment manufacturer is going to supply 36 aircraft, extremely difficult to transfer technology in the real sense of the word, which is also one of the reasons why India had put forward a requirement of a larger batch of aircraft so that they could be gradually productionized and indigenized in this country. Therefore, what is now going to happen is some component manufacturer in India largely assembly will take place here. There is still an offset requirement, 50% supposedly of the value is going to be offset in this, but as usual in these offset deals, you will see that the MOU has been signed between the Rafale manufacturer, Dassault Aviation and Reliance, Anil Ambani is Reliance. And Reliance has zero prior experience in aviation and actually funnily enough, even very little or no experience in any kind of manufacturing. How a corporation like that expects to enter into any kind of manufacturing role for as sophisticated a piece of engineering as a combat aircraft is completely beyond me. So, clearly they are only going to be turning the screw drivers here. Importantly, the offsets are not going to be within the Rafale deal. Dassault Aviation is going to start sub-assembly or assembly of its Falcon jets, which are civilian jets and they will show that as offsets. Now, this is achieving only a commercial goal. Some amount of money gets spent in India, but the idea of the offsets was not just to gain money, but to gain technology. Buying 36 aircraft is going to cost us anything between 60 to 70% of the total 126 aircraft we are negotiating with France earlier. So, it does seem that per aircraft a cost is roughly two and a half to three times what was originally envisaged. Now, this again seems to be a very arbitrary decision. One doesn't know exactly how much these 36 aircraft are going to cost. In her otherwise fairly extensive press conference yesterday, all that Raksha Mantri could promise was that she will make the data available. I'm not sure how much of that is going to happen. It's almost more than a year since it's happened and there's always confidentiality clauses to hide behind and that too in defense matters. So, with one thing or another, I'm not sure we'll get to know what exactly is involved, but the deal as such because they are fly away condition aircraft with all kinds of other after-sales service and all promised and this is precisely the idea of building in more indigenization is to acquire the capability and to bring down costs and in this case you're achieving neither. So, you're locked into a kind of long-term path dependency as it were because anything that you need to be done, you'll have to call that's all. And I have a last worry and that is India has suddenly started talking about buying a whole lot of single-engined aircraft. We started this discussion saying how come after India took so long and after a long process of deliberation arrived at the requirement for twin-engined aircraft and 126 of them and now suddenly you turned back and revert to single-engined aircraft even there given the way the Rafale deal has gone how do we know they are going to buy 100, 200 with gradual indigenization or suddenly because of emergency requirement that's also going to end up with 35 or 40 bought-out aircraft. I think this is we are entering into very dangerous territory, very thoughtful procedures of decision making to enable thoughtful planning for acquisitions has been set up and now you're back to taking arbitrary decisions which was precisely the reason why those defense procurement procedures were set up in the first place. You know one part is corruption, the other is you get what is called the museum of different technologies that means you get 36 Rafale, you get some Grippen, you get some F-16s. Now all of this is mishpash of technologies maintaining them dependencies or different kinds of parties all of it also make you much more vulnerable. So in fact it was to get out of the Mirage mix that we had that it was decided we should this time go for a larger volume and as you said develop indigenous capability that path is with abandoned we are back to shopping on a peaceful basis. Last question on this India also has its own combat aircraft technology which has taken one considerable period of time to develop one shouldn't really worry about that because F-35s have taken almost 35 years so therefore this is not unknown in the aviation industry so do you think there is a in fact a much stronger case for building one or two lines one of which should be our indigenous capability technology itself? 100% because as you know I have long been critical of the slow pace of development of the LCA project I believe that more resources and more planning should have gone into it to ensure quicker and more effective delivery of the LCA aircraft India has set up very successful systems to achieve self reliance in technology in space and in nuclear and in both these cases by the way even though they are very high tech and the deepest part of the security establishment in this country we have achieved not only a high extent of indigenization a lot of the manufacture today is being done by the private sector under subcontracts from either BARC or from ISRO in the nuclear or these space cases the same thing could have been developed by now for the LCA and can be developed in future also right now Hindustan aeronautics is saying we can supply only 15 aircraft a year which is clearly not enough it is then up to the government to build a system where you can increase production volumes by putting in more money into a decentralized thing which I am sure HAL will be happy to take up and I think that's the route to go rather than if you today go with an F-16 route or something like that you're likely to see the LCA go further down the priority line essentially it is mortgaging our future future air force capabilities to the exigencies shall we say of new strategic alliances Mr Modi is trying to build yeah thank you very much for being with us this is the all the time we have today news click please keep watching news click and also visit our youtube site our facebook page