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Surely I hope the people here won't let the words of a so-called "unnamed French official" in an Ajai Shukla article cloud your judgement & views.
Ajai Shukla of all people! The same guy who wanted to kill MMRCA from Day 1!
There are strong reasons why even after MMRCA being unconclusive, the MoD/IAF decided to carry forward negotiations with Dassault on a single-vendor basis.
The Rafale is exactly when we needed and that's what we decided after studying over 600 technical points and producing over 1,000 pages of evaluation reports for each competing aircraft. Surely, such strong technical & operational knowledge stands for something...it's saddening to see some people just shouting "dump Rafale, dump Rafale" and accusing everyone of corruption without understanding how thoroughly the evaluation was conducted and why & how Rafale was selected. AND even after all this, why we still are sticking to our plan of buying it.
MRCA's big mistake was to the concept of L-1. The prudent way would have been to pit both the finalists against each other and the best deal wins. We now know the whole commercial bid by Dassault for the MRCA was a farse, with tons of hidden costs, thus bringing the whole project up significantly. While also means, Rafale wasn't really L-1.
Second mistake was made by Modi who again stuck to the Rafale, they should have allowed EF to compete even if only to put Dassult back in its place, now we are left stroking our [edited] while the pimps at Dassult try their level best to screw with us every step of the way.
The costs in the meantime have ballooned, the timing has shifted and Rafale is not worth it at the prices being peddled. If the deal can be signed for 8 billion for 36 fighters + weapons + 50% offsets + service charges for 10 years, its a done deal, if not Dassault will have to go fishing else where.
From what I hear the cost of the weapons packge will be lower as IAF prefers predominantly US weapons on the Rafale, now its just a matter of dropping the price of the deal to €8 billion and we can end up eventually with 90 Rafale in all for the IAF i.e a SQD each for every one of the 5 air commands.
The ball is in Dassault's court. Rafale is not worth it at 36 fighters for 12 billion i.e. a whopping €333 million per bird. For that we can easily have 200 Mig-35 or 80 Advanced Super Hornets. Now 36 Rafale can't bring the same value as 200 Mig-35s even with a poor 30% availability rate.
