There is more than meet the eyes,
Firstly you can agree that it was impossible to get 126 planes at 10 billion dollars with the lines and other things.
Well, there was never a 10 billion limit to start with, all we kept hearing about the costs for a decade now, was media speculations, that even started before MMRCA, with the initial MRCA. So that figure was just taken over from speculations of the earlier tender, but with the addition of Rafale, EF, F18SH and the requirement of AESA, it was clear that the cost will jump as well.
The price for all that was offered would be more than twice, maybe about US$ 30 billion
If you take the system cost and costs for weapons to account quite possible, but then again, the procurement cost was never the issue.
The MMRCA had a cleared budget before the shortlisting, which was confirmed by IAF at the time. There was no focus on low costs as a shortlisting factor either, nor was the tender cancelled on high costs, but on non compliance to the RFP.
Costs only came into the game, because of HALs calculation issue, since it might had made the EF L1.
Also the way the method was chosen is that 2 would be final selected and the govt will deal only with L1 and in case the discussions did not reach conclusions then there was no condition to discuss with L2 thus, with all the fixing. Rafale was selected L1 and with Dassault playing hard ball, there was no chance for GoI discussing with L2
That's not correct, there was a possibility and the question is, why wasn't it chosen?
=>
India may need to walk away from Rafale to buy MMRCA
by Saurabh Joshi • April 10, 2015
...There is nothing that prevents the defense ministry from declaring any or all of the following:
1. Dassault’s bid is no longer L1
2. Dassault’s bid is no longer compliant with the terms of the RFP
Once such a determination is made, the defense ministry is free to negotiate with the new ‘L1’; in this case the European four-nation Eurofighter Typhoon consortium.
The defense ministry is also free to resort to provisions outlined in Para 73 of the Defense Procurement Procedure (DPP) upon approval by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), which allow it to negotiate with and conclude an order from any of the other vendors that participated in the MMRCA tender.
Para 73 of the Defense Procurement Procedure (DPP) says:
In certain acquisition cases, imperatives of strategic partnerships or major diplomatic, political, economic, technological or military benefits deriving from a particular procurement may be the principal factor determining the choice of a specific platform or equipment on a single vendor basis. These considerations may also dictate the selection of particular equipment offered by a vendor not necessarily the lowest bidder (L1). Decisions on all such acquisitions would be taken by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) on the recommendations of the DPB...
https://www.stratpost.com/india-may-need-to-walk-away-from-rafale-to-buy-mmrca/
IAF top brass were not help at all when they were giving bad timed interviews like "there is no plan B" thus actually putting the ball in Dassaults court, thus there was no way Dassault could lose this
That's out of context, since IAF remarked that wrt no split of the tender and no alternative procurement of non medium class fighters. They never said that they only want Rafale, in fact several different air chiefs are on record, by saying that IAF needs an MMRCA, not necessarily Rafale.
But NDA turned out very smart, and he cancelled the RFP and just to keep IAF happy they ordered 36 token Rafale along with base infrastructure
Smart for their own political reasons true, to get good PR, but that's it. IAF was not happy at all, since again several air chiefs are on record, saying that 36 is not enough and that it requires at least 90 more.
Same goes for the 6 Apaches that the government bought for IA, do you think they are happy to get a fraction of the required numbers (39)? Does it make any operational difference to have 36 Rafales or 6 Apaches? Not really, but at least the government can say that did something.
But doing "something" is not = doing "the right thing"! These kind of PR deals and fake DAC clearances won't protect the country.
