NEWS
India is yet to shortlist contenders for supplying 126 fighter jets under the $11-billion (`50,600 crore) medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) deal. “At the moment, the Offset Technical Committee—headed by the Special Secretary of Defence Production and including members from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD)—is evaluating technical offset proposals and sending their observations to all the six contenders,” officials privy to the process recently stated. “Based on the observations, vendors would submit fresh and revised offset proposals,” they added.

VIEWS
Reference to the so-called Offset Technical Committee appears to have been done erroneously. In all probability, the news is eluding to the setting up of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), the seventh step in the long winding path of India’s Defence Procurement Procedure (for details see Forum ‘Make it Easy’ in September Issue of SP’s Aviation). The TOC comes into play after the completion of the ‘field trials’ and ‘staff evaluation’ carried out by the concerned service—in this case it is the Indian Air Force (IAF). Headed by the Defence Secretary, the TOC is supposed to have a three-member team comprising one service officer (in this case from the IAF), one scientist from the DRDO and one representative of a Defence Public Sector Undertaking (DPSU) not involved in the MMRCA acquisition. As per the defence procurement procedure (DPP), the TOC’s mandate is to see whether the trials, evaluation of results, compliance to qualitative requirements (QRs) and selection of vendors were done according to the prescribed procedures. The TOC also looks into the methodology adopted during the trials vis-à-vis the trial methodology given in the request for proposal (RFP) and the trial directive.

The TOC is given 30 days to put up its report to the Defence Secretary and after his acceptance the stage could be set for the acquisition process to move on to the commercial negotiations phase. The TOC, therefore, is required to, by and large, comment on the correctness of the previous phase of the DPP i.e. field trials and resulting staff evaluation. However, if the news is to be believed, it is obvious that the TOC has been additionally mandated to also evaluate the offset proposals which must have been put up by different vendors in the response phase of the RFP. This activity would normally have taken place in the next phase, along with the opening of the commercial bids of the selected vendors.

By pre-empting the offset evaluation process, it appears that the offset proposals of practically all the contending vendors are being studied. As per reports based on the observations of the TOC, vendors would be asked to submit fresh and revised proposals which would then be taken into account for evaluating the vendors again, before the TOC finally prepares its report for submission to the MoD. The MoD can decide on shortlisting the vendors only when the technical oversight and field trials reports are complete. It is only after this process is complete that the Contract Negotiations Committee (CNC) would be appointed to carry the process further.