India — Purchase of C‑17 Aircrafts from US / Purchase of MiG Aircrafts

Gov­ern­ment of India has signed a Let­ter of Offer and Accep­tance with US Gov­ern­ment for pro­cure­ment of 10 C‑17 Globe­mas­ter III Very Heavy Trans­port Air­craft. The total cost of the air­craft and asso­ci­at­ed equip­ment is esti­mat­ed at US $ 4.116 bil­lion

This infor­ma­tion was giv­en by Min­is­ter of Defence Shri AK Antony in a writ­ten reply to Shri­mati T. RatnaBai and Shri Anil Mad­hav Dave in Rajya Sab­ha today. 

Pur­chase of MiG Aircrafts

A total of 872 MiG air­craft of var­i­ous types were pur­chased from 1966–1980. The MiG series air­craft were induct­ed start­ing from MiG-21 in 1960s/1970s to MiG-29 in 1980s. These air­craft were pur­chased as per rules/procedures of that peri­od. At present the pro­cure­ment of cap­i­tal equip­ment is car­ried out as per Defence Pro­cure­ment Procedure. 

The train­ing of ini­tial batch­es of pilots for MiG series air­craft was car­ried out in erst­while USSR, fol­lowed by train­ing for the rest of the pilots in India. The pro­cure­ment cas­es involv­ing Russ­ian ori­gin MiG-21 Bis& MiG-27 air­craft involved Trans­fer of Tech­nol­o­gy (ToT) and license pro­duc­tion by HAL. 

482 MiG air­craft acci­dents took place since Finan­cial Year (FY) 1971–72 to FY 2012–13 (till 19th April 2012). 

A total of 171 pilots, 39 civil­ians, 8 ser­vice per­son­nel and 1 air­crew lost their lives in these acci­dents. The caus­es of acci­dents were both human error and tech­ni­cal defects. 

This infor­ma­tion was giv­en by Min­is­ter of Defence Shri AK Antony in a writ­ten reply to Shri Vijay Jawa­har­lal Dar­da in Rajya Sab­ha today. 

Source:
Press Infor­ma­tion Bureau, Gov­ern­ment of India