The Last MiG-21s Are Leaving. The IAF’s Self-Sabotage Isn’t

This month, the Indian Air Force will finally retire its last MiG-21s, drawing the curtain on a fleet that has remained in service for an extraordinary 62 years. These Soviet-era fighters, introduced in the early 1960s, have long outlived their intended operational lifespan. They were meant to be phased out over a decade ago, first by the Tejas Mk1 and then by the more advanced Mk1A and Mk2 variants. Yet as the MiGs prepare to exit, there are still no fully available replacements on the tarmac.

Much of the blame for this state of affairs is laid at the feet of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence and the slow-moving machinery of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and the Aeronautical Development Agency.

While the role of MoD bureaucrats in this breakdown is well known, the role of the armed forces is far less understood outside policy circles.

Make no mistake, the MoD babus deserve all the brickbats and then some for their Antony-esque incompetence. The MoD’s convoluted procurement system is arguably the most incorrigible obstacle to India’s defence modernisation.

Former Army Chief General V K Singh (Retd) once likened it to a game of “snakes and ladders” in which there are “no ladders.” Each proposal must navigate a maze of approvals, cost committees, finance clearances, vetting groups, and monitoring cells, any one of which can send a file tumbling back to square one.

But this broken process does not absolve the services themselves, and certainly not the Indian Air Force. The military has long had a penchant for drafting fantastical qualitative requirements, setting the bar so high that hardly any product in the global defence market can clear it without extensive customisation.

The military's obsession with gold-plated specifications has repeatedly caused the collapse or indefinite stalling of procurement efforts. In 2015, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar, describing the phenomenon at the India Today Conclave, said those writing the QRs were perhaps watching “Marvel comic movies,” convincingly disguising his vexation as a jest.

In case after case, essential systems and platforms, from fighter aircraft to basic trainers to radars, have been delayed, not only by red tape, but by the services’ own inability to define what they actually need in clear, operational terms.

The IAF is no exception. Its insistence on overly ambitious or vendor-specific requirements has contributed to years-long trials and evaluations, only for tenders to be cancelled, rewritten, or awarded in diluted form.

These delays have had a direct impact on combat readiness, eroding fleet strength, draining budgets, and leaving critical capability gaps unaddressed.

The 2019 performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General offers a rare window into just how deep these internal failures run, and how much of the IAF’s current predicament is of its own making.

And the details are not abstract. The audit lays out, case by case, how the IAF’s own decisions, or lack thereof, repeatedly delayed or derailed critical acquisitions.

The Self-Sabotage of Over-Specification

Take the case of problematic Air Staff Qualitative Requirements, or ASQRs, for instance. The entire acquisition process hinges on how these are drafted. They determine not just what is bought, but also who can compete, how much it will cost, and how long the process will take.

The Defence Procurement Procedure mandates that ASQRs be broad, functional, and free of vendor-specific language.

But the IAF routinely does the opposite. Instead of describing what the platform needs to do, the IAF often lists what it must look like. This narrows the field, locks out alternatives, and sets the process up for failure. In trying to chase the perfect product on paper, the service has repeatedly made real-world procurement practically unworkable.

The CAG found that ASQRs were frequently changed midstream, often without recorded justification. In some cases, parameters were altered to avoid ending up with a single-vendor scenario, which disqualifies a tender under the DPP. In others, they were quietly modified to match vendor feedback.

In a previous audit, the CAG had noted that ASQR waivers were required in almost 50 per cent of the cases, adding over four to six months of delay each time. But DPP 2013 eventually banned such changes after approval of necessity, meaning even minor non-compliance often forced a complete restart of the process.

In the case of the Apache and Chinook helicopters bought from the US, the requirements evolved so closely with the specifications of specific products that they ended up resembling pre-written product brochures.

The Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender saw even more arbitrary shifts. In 2000, the IAF specified that each aircraft should carry six to nine missiles, but by 2004 this was inexplicably reduced to just two, before being raised again to four in 2007.

Similarly, the required missile range was set at “more than nb km” in 2000, cut down to “nc km” in 2004, and then reverted to “nb km” in 2007.

Equally damaging was the IAF’s fixation on exhaustive detail. The ASQR for the MMRCA included 660 parameters. The attack helicopter required 166. Even a Doppler weather radar came with 42 listed requirements.

This level of micromanagement made it nearly impossible for any vendor to meet every condition. Some offered superior technology but were still marked non-compliant because they deviated from narrow specifications.

In one instance, the IAF’s requirements for the C-130J-30 asked for capabilities not even available to the US Air Force, or still under development.

Instead of encouraging competition, the IAF’s technical overreach distorted it. In 90 per cent of the cases, not a single technical bid was able to meet all the ASQR parameters. The result was often delay, waiver, or abandonment, and a critical capability gap left unfilled.

IAF Lost the Market Before the Tender

If the IAF’s over-engineered and shifting requirements laid the groundwork for dysfunction, the actual process of seeking offers only compounded the damage.

In case after case examined by the CAG, the number of vendors who responded to formal tenders was far lower than the number initially approached. For the Apache attack helicopter, six vendors were sent RFPs but only three responded.

For the basic trainer aircraft, twelve vendors were contacted but just seven submitted bids. In at least five of eight major cases, only two vendors responded despite RFPs being issued to as many as ten.

This was not just a reflection of global defence industry dynamics or export controls, as the Ministry later claimed. Many of the products being acquired, such as weather radars and basic trainers, were not restricted by foreign governments.

The real reason was structural. Vendors were walking away because they saw a system that could not decide what it wanted, kept changing the rules midstream, and demanded compliance with unrealistic or outdated specifications.

Worse, the IAF did not even know who to call. Despite a longstanding mandate under the Defence Procurement Procedure, Air Headquarters had no maintained or centralised vendor database. There was no institutional memory of who had been approached, who had responded, or what past experience those vendors had with Indian contracts. In several cases, even basic records of whether a vendor had received or acknowledged a Request for Proposal (RFP) were missing.

Without a current and comprehensive vendor database, the IAF was flying blind. It kept sending out tenders into a market it had no map of and then wondered why no one responded.

A Case Study in Chaos: The Apache Helicopter Acquisition

The Apache attack helicopter deal, one of the IAF’s marquee capital acquisitions, is often held up as a success. But the path to that final contract was anything but smooth.

Much of the chaos was self-inflicted. The CAG audit reveals that the delays, retractions, and re-tendering in this case stemmed not only from Ministry red tape but also from the IAF’s own mismanagement of specifications and vendor engagement.

The process began in 2007 when the IAF, responding to an Army request for better attack helicopter support, proposed buying Russian AC2 helicopters on a single-vendor basis. The Ministry rejected this and directed a competitive tender instead.

A Request for Proposal was issued in 2008 to seven vendors, based on 166 ASQRs, a massive increase from the original 15. These new requirements were not just broad operational goals but detailed design specifications covering everything from temperature thresholds to pod-mounted gun calibre.

Unsurprisingly, none of the three vendors who responded, including AgustaWestland and Eurocopter, could fully meet all 166 parameters. AgustaWestland, for example, missed the temperature and gun calibre thresholds by narrow margins but was still disqualified.

The CAG later pointed out that these disqualifications were avoidable. If the parameters were not operationally critical, they could have been waived. If they were critical, then watering them down later made little sense.

After cancelling the first tender, the IAF issued a Request for Information in 2009 to a smaller group of vendors to check their ability to meet the most problematic 10 parameters. This process too was flawed. Responses were incomplete or hedged, and some leading manufacturers like Sikorsky and Rosoboronexport were not contacted at all.

Despite this limited market engagement, the IAF revised the ASQRs, diluting 26 parameters and removing nine, and reissued the RFP in May 2009.

This second attempt fared no better. Of the six vendors contacted, only three responded, and two of them were the same as before. One key vendor, Eurocopter, dropped out entirely, citing concerns over lifetime maintenance obligations under the life cycle cost evaluation. The Ministry had revised the ASQRs to attract more bidders but failed to build or retain a credible vendor base.

The Technical Evaluation Committee cleared all three offers for trials, but two of the vendors, AgustaWestland and Rosoboronexport, had not provided essential sub-system details and sought to quote additional prices later.

The IAF, desperate to avoid further delays, pushed for proceeding anyway. Only Boeing eventually cleared the field evaluation trials. The others either failed or dropped out.

In the end, the IAF’s own decisions, drafting over-engineered and unrealistic requirements, disqualifying close matches on minor grounds, selectively engaging with vendors, and then walking back its own specifications, added years to a deal that could have been signed far earlier. The Apache case is not just a story of Ministry of Defence sluggishness.

It is a case study in how an indecisive and internally conflicted IAF helped sabotage its own acquisition.

The MMRCA Meltdown

The Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) programme, once projected as the Indian Air Force’s most ambitious fighter acquisition, became a textbook example of how not to run a major defence procurement. Even though it eventually led to the selection of the Rafale, a highly capable aircraft, the process itself was marred by missed opportunities, shifting specifications, and a self-defeating obsession with technical perfection.

The original proposal from the IAF, made in 2000, was for 126 Mirage 2000-II aircraft. The logic was sound. The IAF already operated the Mirage 2000; its performance during the Kargil conflict was stellar, and the upgraded version offered an affordable and familiar platform that could be built under licence by HAL. It met India’s operational needs in the medium-weight multirole category and would have offered immediate fleet rationalisation benefits.

But the Ministry of Defence rejected the proposal on procedural grounds. Despite repeated resubmissions by the IAF and technical discussions with Dassault and HAL, the MoD insisted on a competitive process, citing the rules of the DPP. By the time this back and forth ended in 2004, four critical years had been lost. The IAF's fighter fleet had continued to shrink, and the cost of every viable alternative had only risen.

When the IAF finally agreed to a competitive tender and began framing the ASQRs, it again ran into trouble of its own making. A Request for Information (RFI) was sent to five vendors in late 2004, ostensibly to help align the specifications with market offerings. But vendors mostly submitted public brochures, not detailed technical data.

The IAF already had sufficient information to frame realistic specs, having submitted three separate Mirage 2000 acquisition proposals earlier, yet it took another three years to issue the final Request for Proposal in August 2007.

And that RFP was, by all accounts, over-engineered. The ASQRs for the MMRCA ran into the hundreds of line items, 660 parameters in total. These weren’t broad, functional requirements but highly detailed specifications, often specifying exact technologies and subsystems rather than capabilities. This had a predictable effect: none of the six aircraft that responded to the tender met all the ASQRs.

Audit reports later found that many of the requirements were too narrow or based on outdated assumptions. In several cases, vendors were offering more advanced or equivalent capabilities through different technologies but were marked non-compliant. The Rafale, for instance, was initially rejected due to 14 deviations from the ASQRs, even though it met the IAF’s operational needs in the most critical categories.

"The inclusion of narrow design and technological features in the ASQRs, at least one of them outdated and redundant, created difficulties during technical evaluation as waivers were required for not meeting the prescribed ASQRs," the CAG report says, adding, "The Staff Evaluation Report had recommended for waiving of noncompliance of Rafale aircraft to four ASQR parameters as they were not needed in the first place."

After further clarification and a revised technical evaluation, Rafale was allowed to proceed to the field trial stage. However, many of the features that had led to its initial disqualification were now folded into a set of 14 Indian-Specific Enhancements, upgrades that Dassault agreed to implement at an additional cost.

Later audits noted that several of these enhancements were either already demonstrated during field trials or were standard features on other competing aircraft. Yet India ended up paying extra to integrate them.

Throughout the MMRCA process, the IAF kept refining, tweaking, and occasionally rewriting its requirements. Waivers had to be obtained for multiple parameters, and the cost of last-minute customisations mounted. What began as a relatively urgent procurement dragged on for nearly a decade, and by the time the government finally selected Rafale in 2012, the original tender had lost momentum.

The final contract, for just 36 jets, had to be negotiated afresh by the Narendra Modi government through a separate intergovernmental agreement.

The Rafale may have been the right choice in the end. But the process that got India there was riddled with delays and distortions, many of them created by the IAF itself.

The IAF did not merely suffer from a broken system. It shaped and worsened that system by wasting years chasing an obsolete aircraft, drafting over-engineered specifications, and then agreeing to pay extra for modifications that were either avoidable or already available. The result was a procurement collapse that set India’s fighter modernisation back by at least two decades.