#dnaEdit: Modi seals deal

There was a sense of urgency in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to buy ready-to-fly 36 Rafale medium multi-role aircrafts (MMRA) from France. The PM was in France as part of a three-nation tour. The Indian Air Force was urgently in need of replenishing its strength. Instead of the required 42 squadrons, the IAF has been reduced to 34. With the aged MiG fighter planes to be phased out, the need for quick replacements was becoming urgent. The $7.7 billion deal that has been struck now will have to go through the purchase and induction phases. This would take time, but it will enable the Air Force to have the new planes in its fleet faster.

This is not the first time that a major defence deal has been struck between India and France. In the 1980s, India had acquired the French-make Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft. Some of those planes are now in the process of up-gradation which will take time to complete. The Rafale purchase will have to be followed by a longer-term contract similar to the one India had, in the case of the Mirage deal. 

If Modi wants to build on his idea of creating an indigenous defence manufacturing sector, then India and France will have to work out an agreement for the manufacture of the Rafale in collaboration with an Indian manufacturer. At the moment, the only company that is in the business of aircraft design and manufacture in the country is the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited in Bengaluru, a public sector unit. But all this lies in the future.

The request for the delivery of 36 Rafale jets is to tide over the immediate need for maintaining the strength of the force.

Unfortunately, India’s need for the MMRA is more than a decade old now. The search for getting a new aircraft has been on since 2006. It can be argued that defence purchases cannot be made in a hurry, and that all options should be examined. There is, however, a need to speed up the process of defence procurement to the extent that it is possible. In the classical capitalist sense, obsolescence is inbuilt into any new product. One of the ways of factoring the needs of the defence forces is to keep modernisation as an ongoing process.

India would have to develop a very sophisticated and highly advanced research and development arm in the defence establishment. The existing Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is inadequate to live up to this task. The organisation is in need of radical restructuring. The research work should be integrated with university science departments. It will help in universities getting more funding while boosting scientific research in the country. The fall out of research in defence will have ripple effects in other fields as well. This is the American model, and it is quite an attractive model as it has kept American science on the move. This would not necessarily imply the dismantlement of DRDO or the HAL. It requires involving many more institutions like the universities and other research laboratories.

At the same time, objections of pacifists that building scientific research and economic growth on the strength of defence manufactures reflects short-sightedness of policymaking, cannot be brushed aside. These are, indeed,  valid objections. But in a real world, where security and conflict have not been made obsolete, it makes practical sense to build scientific research on the basis of defence needs.