India To Share Its MMRCA Experience With Brazil

During a meeting between Indian defense minister A K Anthony and his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim, India expressed its willingness to share some of its documentation on the MMRCA contract. Brazil, like India earlier this year, is carrying out an open tender evaluation to select a fighter for its air force. At the meeting, Amorim said Brazil was eager to learn from India's process of finalizing Rafale, the French fighter, for the over $10 billion MMRCA contract. It is one of the world's biggest defence tenders right now. "Brazil is in the process of buying a fighter jet. You have already reached the final stages of the fighter selection for the air force. They have promised to give us some documents on the selection process, such as basic rules on the tender process that we could compare to ours," Amorim was quoted as saying by The Times of India. According to the report, Brazil is looking to buy 36 new fighters for its air force and the tender had left it open to the possibility of the number of fighters going up to 120. The tender could run into several billion dollars, though the initial estimate was just $2.2 billion. Brazil has already made a pre-selection of three fighters - Rafale, F-18 and Gripen-NG and one will finally be selected. Brazil is also providing India an exclusively developed catalogue of NATO military equipment, in which India was interested, he told The Times of India.