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India to ease defence offsets norms

By IANS,

New Delhi : India is preparing to ease its defence offsets policy to facilitate greater investments in the domestic military industry whenever the nation buys hardware worth over Rs.300 crore or $60 million.

A meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council chaired by Defence Minister A.K. Antony Thursday considered the proposals to amend the offsets policy, which is part of the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP).

The latest DPP was issued in 2011 and under it any defence acquisition worth $60 million or more would fetch the domestic defence, aerospace and homeland security industries 30 percent of the deal.

After the DAC meeting, a senior defence ministry official said: “This is part of the discussion process to make the defence offsets a little more flexible to enable military vendors plough back their offsets commitments in the Indian defence industry.”

“The discussions today (Thursday) remained inconclusive and the matter will again be taken up for discussion in the next meeting,” he added.