India and France on Friday inked a 7.87 billion euro deal for 36 Rafale fighters, which with their state of the art 150-km range Meteor air-to-air missiles to combat against Pakistan’s F-16 jets, according to a report on Times of India.
India will get the first Rafale in three years, with all 36 touching down by early-2022. Till then, in the event of a conflict, India will have to deploy two Sukhoi-30MKIs to tackle each Pakistani F-16 due to the latter’s superior weapons package, including 80-km range missiles. But once the Rafales are inducted, Pakistan will have to deploy two F-16s for each of them.
The inter-governmental agreement (IGA), inked by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian here in South Block, does not put any restriction on the fighter being used as a “strategic platform”.
Parrikar himself was quite gung-ho about the deal. “Rafale is a very potent fighter that will add to the IAF’s airpower and deep-strike capabilities,” he said. Le Drian added, “The Rafale is really the best fighter jet in the world. It is an omni-role aircraft capable of all kinds of missions.”
“The Meteor missile is superior to any such missile in the region. The over 300km Scalp air-to-ground cruise missile also has the two-metre precision capability. Rafale also has a faster turnaround time, capable of undertaking five sorties in a day. The other fighters we have can do only three sorties at the most,” said a source.
The Rafale deal also has a 50 per cent offsets clause, under which France will have to plough half of the actual contract value back into India. “This has huge potential to generate direct and indirect employment opportunities in India,” he said.