Indian Military

British arms major BAE Systems Thursday opted out of India’s tender for 1,580 towed artillery guns with the deadline for submitting the bids coming to an end, a company official said here.

The tender was issued on January 28 under the Indian Army’s Rs.20,000 crore (Rs.200 billion/$ 444.8 million) artillery guns modernization program that has been hit by the taint surrounding the purchase of the Bofors guns 24 years ago.

The firm has the FH-77B05 155-mm 52 caliber towed gun among its products that it could have offered, but will now not do so after a detailed assessment of the tender documents, the official said.

BAE Systems, however, is on the verge of signing a Rs. 2,900 crore contract for 145 M-777 ultra-light howitzers. This gun is manufactured by the company in the US and the sale will be under the Foreign Military Sales route of the US government.

The tender for the towed guns seems jinxed, with the defence ministry cancelling the March 2008 tender in July 2010 and issuing a fresh request for information after BAE’s competitor Singapore Technologies Kinetics had sought more time for bringing its gun iFH-2000 for the trials in India, citing a single vendor situation emerging due to that development then.

The matter of the blacklisting of Singapore Technologies by the Indian Ministry of Defense just gets curiouser and curiouser. The arms company has contradicted the basis of the report, tabled by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in Parliament, on the special audit it conducted at the request of the Ministry of Defense, into the facts and circumstances that gave rise to the corruption case against the former Director General of Ordnance Factories and Chairman of the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), Sudipta Ghosh.

The arms company had been recommended for blacklisting by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in June last year, after Sudipta Ghosh was implicated in a corruption case. A decision to blacklist was held in abeyance last December to allow trials of artillery howitzers and other weapons systems to be conducted, subject to the investigations agency’s final report.

But in January the company claimed this was not the case and that it had not, in fact, been blacklisted.

The Indian Army has issued a Request For Information (RFI) for towed artillery guns, effectively canceling the previous process for procurement of these weapons systems, in which BAE Systems was fielding the FH77 B05, (an upgraded version of the FH77 B02 in service with the army) against Singapore Technologies (ST) Kinetics’ iFH 2000.

The army, which had issued the RFI on Thursday, gave much cause for confusion, by initially alluding to ‘A Self Propelled Gun System mounted on a vehicle chassis such as CEASER 155 mm Self propelled Gun’. The line was deleted on Friday evening, to remove any doubts about the earlier tender process being canceled.

During the day, on Friday, sources in the Ministry of Defense confirmed that the RFI, indeed, indicated a fresh tender for 155 mm/52 caliber Towed Artillery Guns. The reason the ministry gave for this decision was the creation of a single-vendor situation due to the non-appearance of the ST Kinetics’ gun at the trials.