India’s military, one of the world’s largest weapons buyers, unveiled a new arms acquisition policy on Saturday aimed at weeding out corruption in the defense sector.
The policy announcement came just over a week after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged to crack down on defense corruption following a string of graft scandals that has put his government on the back foot.
The Indian Ministry of Defence said the new policy would seek the “highest standard of transparency” in arms purchases for the country’s million-plus military, the world’s fourth-largest.
“[It] aims to balance the competing requirements of expediting capital procurement ... and conforming to the highest standards of transparency, probity and public accountability,” the ministry said in a statement.
In a bid to boost India’s domestic defense industry, the policy gives first right of refusal to Indian vendors, according a “higher preference explicitly to the Buy Indian, Buy and Make Indian” approach.
Defence Minister A.K. Antony in a foreword to the policy paper said he hoped the procedure will be a “progressive step aimed at giving impetus to indigenization, creating [a] level playing field ... and expediting the procurement process as a whole.”
India is negotiating a series of huge procurement contracts, including for fighter jets, combat helicopters, as well as artillery, drones and electronic warfare systems, as it seeks to update its aging military hardware.
A week ago, Singh warned he was committed to make purchases of military hardware more “transparent, smooth, efficient and less vulnerable to unethical practices.”
In February, public anger over alleged bribes paid by Italian company Finmeccanica to secure a US$748 million contract for 12 helicopters forced New Delhi to order an investigation and suspend the deal.
Italian prosecutors suspect kickbacks worth about 50 million euros (US$64 million) were paid to Indian officials to ensure Finmeccanica’s British unit AgustaWestland won the contract, according to Italian media reports.
An Indian preliminary inquiry report has linked four firms, four Westerners and seven Indians to the bribery allegations.
The governing Indian Congress party, up for re-election in May next year, has been hit by a string of scandals.
Two ministers resigned last month after one was accused of interfering in a graft probe and another was linked to a bribery allegation.
The defense scandal erupted at a time when the government was already fighting charges by the national auditor that underpricing of the sale of telecom spectrum and cut-rate allocation of coalfields cost India billions of dollars.
The controversy paralyzed parliament and derailed measures to further open up the state-controlled economy as growth plunged to a decade-low of 5 percent in the past financial year.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.