Government Tuesday ruled out opening defence deals to public scrutiny at the procurement stage under the recently passed right to information law.
The defence deals could not be made public while the procurement process was on. Once the deals were contracted,
they were open to any scrutiny whether through RTI or Parliament debates, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said in
an interaction with media after inaugurating the 4th Defence Expo in New Delhi.
Outlining the government's drive to finalise at the earliest major defence contracts to purchase multi-role combat aircraft, 155 mm artillery guns and state-of-art surveillance equipment for the three services, he indicated that the current level of defence allocation would continue.
Mukherjee said that the Request for Proposals for purchase of 126 fighter aircraft for the Indian Air Force were open to any manufacturer.
Along with the acquisition of these aircraft, he said IAF was going in for upgradation of its entire fighter fleet comprising MiG 21, MiG 27, MiG 29 and Sukhois and its subsystems.