[The United States has already dethroned Russia as the leading exporter of defense wares to India, landing more than 40 percent of recent defense deals. The fighter jet contract involves planes for India’s Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft program. The jets would put the Indian air force’s aging fleet on a high-technology route and strengthen its air defense as it warily watches China develop its own stealth fighter and Pakistan buy new U.S. planes.]
By Rama Lakshmi
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| Rama Lakshmi |
NEW DELHI — India announced Thursday that it rejected bids by U.S. companies seeking a $12 billion fighter jet contract, leaving only European defense contractors in the running.
India shortlisted the French company Dassault, which produces the Rafale jet, and the four-nation European consortium Eurofighter, which makes the Typhoon, according to an official in India’s Defense Ministry.
The deal for 126 fighters had been considered a key component of the growing defense partnership between India and the United States, and President Obama had personally advocated on behalf of U.S. companies while visiting India in November.
But India’s decision not to accept bids from either of the U.S. companies, Boeing or Lockheed Martin, raised questions about the strength of that relationship, analysts said.
“It’s hard not to see it having ramifications for the relationship. You had two administrations lobbying very hard with the Indians for what is the fighter jet sale of the 21st century,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
A major hurdle for the United States, Riedel said, was its perception in India as an unreliable arms supplier because of past embargoes imposed after various wars and nuclear tests.
“There is a belief that in a crisis situation, particularly if it was an India-Pakistan crisis, the U.S. could pull the plug on parts, munitions, aircraft — precisely at the moment you need them most,” he said. “Memories are deep in this part of the world.”
The jets will constitute more than half of India’s fighter fleet over the next decade, and many thought it was too great a risk to put such a large number at the mercy of U.S. foreign policy.
U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer said in a statement that “we are reviewing the documents received from the government of India and are respectful of the procurement process.”
In a separate statement, Roemer announced his resignation for personal reasons.
Experts said there was more at stake in the deal than the sale of jets. Had U.S. companies won the deal, it would have led to closer strategic cooperation: training, jet upgrades, joint military exercises.
“Of course, there’s a lot more to the relationship politically and militarily than this, but had this gone through, it would have been the centerpiece of it all, so there’s a real loss of opportunity here,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Virginia-based Teal Group who has closely followed the international contest over the contract.
“And you could read into the decision some of the continuing tensions in the relationship,” Aboulafia said. “I think they’ve felt at times like they’re taking a back seat in terms of U.S. military policy to Pakistan.”
According to a recent report by the consulting firm KPMG and the American Chamber of Commerce, about half a dozen American companies are eyeing an estimated $112 billion in opportunities as India goes on a buying spree to modernize its armed forces by 2016.
The United States has already dethroned Russia as the leading exporter of defense wares to India, landing more than 40 percent of recent defense deals. The fighter jet contract involves planes for India’s Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft program. The jets would put the Indian air force’s aging fleet on a high-technology route and strengthen its air defense as it warily watches China develop its own stealth fighter and Pakistan buy new U.S. planes.
India also plans to add its first domestically developed light-combat aircraft, called the Tejas, to its air force in 2015.
In reaching a decision on the fighter jets, analysts said, India conducted its most exhaustive trials ever, with Indian pilots testing aircraft in the Himalayan terrain in the north, the western desert and southern plains.
“In the earlier purchases, our pilots used to visit the seller countries and test the aircraft there. Rarely did the aircraft come to India for tests,” said Jasjit Singh, a retired air commodore in the Indian air force and director of the Center for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. He said India drew up a list of about 500 parameters to evaluate the planes. “This time we have also looked into the life-cycle cost of a plane for the first time. We have asked, ‘Am I going to spend through my nose on spares?’ ”
Defense and nuclear commerce are the big-ticket items in the growing strategic relationship between India and the United States.
But commercial contracts worth billions of dollars that were expected to arise out of the landmark nuclear deal signed in 2008 have yet to materialize because of disagreement over India’s domestic nuclear liability law and bureaucratic delays in securing mandatory assurances that Indian companies will not export American nuclear technology.
Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary who was once the second-in-command at India’s embassy in Washington, said some U.S. political leaders had viewed the fighter-jet contract as a test case for deepening the strategic relationship and a “return-gesture for the nuclear deal between the two nations.
“India could either have made a political decision to give it to the Americans or go for an open international bid. India chose the latter. India went for the ‘may-the-best-plane win’ route.”
Staff writer William Wan in Washington contributed to this report.
[ The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. That was below the 1.4 billion that United Nations demographers were predicting when the head count was conducted last November, and the slowest rate of growth in nearly half a century, demographers said.]
By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE
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April 25: An elderly Chinese man talks to a child on a street of Daxing district in Beijing, China. China's population is aging rapidly and half the people now live in cities, the government said Thursday, April 28, 2011. The data from a national census carried out late last year will fuel debate about whether China should continue with its "one-child" policy, experts said. AP2011 |
The census also documented a vast internal migration, concluding that more than 261 million citizens — nearly one in five — were living in places other than where China’s household registration process had indicated that they did. Most of those are probably migrant laborers who have swelled big cities in search of higher-paying jobs so as to send money back to families that remain in rural areas.
The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. That was below the 1.4 billion that United Nations demographers were predicting when the head count was conducted last November, and the slowest rate of growth in nearly half a century, demographers said.
The average household size shrank by 10 percent, to 3.1 people, and the urban population surged by more than 45 percent, leaving urban and rural Chinese nearly equal in number, the census indicated.
Wang Feng, head of the Center for Public Policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the data show that China “has completely turned a page in its demographic history.”
“It is now a post-transitional population, with very low fertility, quite low mortality, and is being increasingly urbanized,” he said in an e-mail on Thursday. “Such a highly mobile society produces a tremendous dynamism for the Chinese economy and society, and at the same time poses great challenges for the government’s political control.”
Mr. Wang also said that documentation of a rapidly aging society raised new questions about China’s population-control policies, which since 1980 have limited many families to a single child. But President Hu Jintao struck a cautious note in a speech on Tuesday, the state news service Xinhua reported, telling a bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee that China should “stick to and improve its current family planning policy and maintain a low birthrate.”
For a country dead set on joining the ranks of the globe’s most advanced nations, the huge count yielded both promising and disturbing results.
The share of Chinese who were educated rose sharply. University graduates are now about 8.9 out of 100 citizens, an increase of about 2.5 times, and rates of those who have graduated from high school and vocational schools also rose, though not as much.
Yu Xie, a professor of sociology, statistics and population studies at the University of Michigan, said the increase in the number of college-educated Chinese would “place China in a better position in international competition for economic growth.”
“Future economic growth will not only come from manufacturing but from services and high technology,” he said, which will require better-educated workers. “China is already prepared for a post-industrial transition.”
But the figures also revealed less promising trends. They confirmed a yawning gender gap, with 118 male newborns for every 100 females, a disparity researchers blame partly on family planning policies that they say have encouraged abortions of female fetuses.
The population aged markedly: the share of Chinese under age 15 dropped 6.3 percent, while that of those over 60 rose by 2.93 percent. That presages a shrinking labor market, which economists predict will increase pressure for higher wages and divert a gusher of government money into pensions, medical care and other services for the elderly.
The growing proportion of older people can be explained partly by China’s low fertility rate in recent decades, with fewer births to offset the aged. Cai Yong, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the number of children under 15 was even lower than expected, pointing to a fertility rate of about 1.4 children per woman.
That is significantly below the government’s estimated fertility rate of 1.8, and should put pressure on China’s leaders to loosen family planning policies, he said.
Ma Jianting, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference on Thursday that the slowed rate of population growth showed that the one-child policy had “eased the pressure on resources and the environment and laid a relatively good foundation for steady and rapid economic and social development.”
But he suggested that the population’s rapid aging was a matter of potential concern. “We also need to pay close attention to the new changes of our population structure, adhering to the family planning policy while cautiously and gradually improving the policy to promote more balanced population growth in the country,” the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.
