The government is understood to have told Supreme Court that the present Rafale deal is better in terms of “pricing, delivery and maintenance” than the contract UPA was negotiating and which floundered due to the French company and HAL failing to agree on costs as they could not resolve differences over man hours and therefore costs for production under licence of 108 of 126 fighters. The government has said that efforts to revive negotiations under the terms that were being discussed proved a non-starter and a decision was taken to recast the deal, keeping in mind the depletion of India’s fighter fleet as adversaries added aircraft, missile systems and radars to their war-fighting capacities, via the Inter-Governmental Agreement route.