NEW DELHI: Retaining a tough stand on the current price negotiations for the Rafale fighter jet deal, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has said that he is keeping cards close to his chest and has been trying to save money for the nation."I am a tough negotiator. Let me save money for the nation….a good buyer does not put his weakness in front. He keeps his cards close to his chest. Please do not ask me to reveal the card in national interest," the minister said in response to queries on the Rafale deal as well as plans to manufacture fighter jets in India.The minister, who was explaining the defence budgetary allocation, said that adequate funds are available for the Rafale deal and expressed his confidence that contracts worth Rs 1 lakh crore would be signed in the coming few months.The minister, who shared that Rs 3.41 lakh crore had been allocated for the MoD that includes pensions, said that Rs 12-15,000 crore of the capital acquisition funds in the coming financial year are earmarked for new projects, while the rest of the money would go to committed liabilities (payments for equipment already purchased). Parrikar clarified that the Rs 12-15000 cr available would be the first installment payments for deals whose total value would exceed Rs 1 lakh crore.In his address in South Block, Parrikar said that the total defence budget for 2016-17 was Rs.3.41 lakh crore that would come to 17.23 percent of the overall expenditure of the government. Excluding defence pensions, the budget figure was Rs.2.59 lakh crore or 13.09 percent of total expenditure.Parrikar also said that a new method of accounting has been set up for Foreign Military Sales (FMS) with the US and a new corpus has been created that has resulted in savings. "We have saved $700 to $800 million of foreign exchange," the minister said.In a press release, the defence ministry said that the fine-tuned Foreign Military Sales (FMS) procedure with the US government has been affected by setting up a corpus in August 2015. "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," the ministry has said. This new approach enables "utilization of scarce funds on other projects and hedges the country against adverse exchange rates", the ministry has stated.