After bagging India's USD 20 billion MMRCA deal, France wants to deepen the defence cooperation with India. In the year 2013, a US$ 6 billion deal to jointly develop a Quick reaction surface-to-air missile (SAM) named 'Maitri' was finalized during talks between India's then Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh & the French President Mr.Francois Hollande. It was decided that India's DRDO & the French MBDA But as of now the fate of the project is in doldrums. Given that India's own short-range SAM system named 'Akash' is a roaring success, the indifference of Indian Armed forces towards the 'Maitri' project seems to be apparent. Asked about reservations by the Indian Air Force, a top MBDA official in Paris
told PTI, "we have written back answering the issues raised by the IAF.
We are hopeful that this deal would be inked soon." He added that while the range of Maitri will be of 40 km, Akash's range is only 25 km. Sources
at Indian Air Force said that they have nothing against the Maitri
project per se but would prefer to use the available Akash missile
rather than wait for the Indo-French ones to come. "The Maitri project can go on but we want the missiles and Akash is serving that purpose," IAF sources said. If the Maitri project is revived then it will build on the work done by DRDO while developing the Trishul missile (which was scrapped by Indian government), using technology transfer from
MBDA to fill the technological gaps that led to the failure of the
Trishul project. In simple words Maitri is going to be a blend of India's Trishul & MICA missile of France. It is to be noted that India has already placed orders for 490 MICA missiles (at a cost of INR 7,000 crores) for its fleet of Mirage-2000 fighter aircrafts.
Indo-French Maitri missile system
No comments:
Post a Comment