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.
[PTI] Mahindra Group Vice Chairman Anand Mahindra was elected as chairman of Defence Land Systems India, a Mahindra and BAE Systems joint venture company. The inaugural board meeting held here declared the joint venture company operational and also appointed BAE Systems’ managing director international operating group Guy Griffiths as vice chairman of the joint venture’s board. Other board members confirmed at the meeting were Mahindra and Mahindra Limited’s executive vice president V S Parthasarathy, Mahindra Defence Systems chief executive Brigadier (Retd) Khutub Hai, and BAE Systems Global Combat Systems managing director David Allott.
