Friday, 04 March 2016. The Ministry of Defence has fine-tuned the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) procedure with the US Government. Rather than raising bills case-wise every quarter, all the funds against various cases have been pooled together in a corpus. As and when funds are required to be paid per case, in fulfilment of contractual liabilities, the said amount is being withdrawn from the corpus.
Consequent to this creation of the corpus in consultation with the US Government, no payments have been made in the last two quarters of the financial year 2015-16, against cases which necessitated payments, against the said contracts. Instead, payment is being effected from the corpus of 2.3 billion US Dollars. It is hoped that no payments shall be required to be made till the amount of 2.3 billion US Dollars is depleted and there is a necessity for us to replenish certain amount as required.
Consequently, while US government will continue to meet their contractual obligations, there will be no additional burden on Government of India on this account. It enables utilization of scarce funds on other projects and hedges the country against adverse exchange rates.
