By : Deccan Herald


An Israeli firm has bagged a USD 25 million deal to provide night vision devices to the Indian Army, an order which has made India the single largest importer of defence equipment from the West Asian country.
The Israeli firm, Starnight Technologies, will provide night vision equipment over a two-year period ending August 2009, to equip two infantry mountain divisions, according to highly placed sources here.
This is the second major order for night vision devices bagged by the Israeli firm, which through an agreement signed in November, had agreed to supply such equipment worth USD 38 million dollars.
"This is a follow up order," an Israeli official said. Army Chief Gen. J J Singh had recently said that as part of infantry modernisation, Army planned to equip all its battalions with night vision equipment.
Though almost all the frontline units and those engaged in counter-insurgency have been equipped with night vision devices, according to Army estimates such equipment worth over USD 500 million was still needed to arm the remaining units. The Israel Defence Ministry had recently announced that India now was its largest single importer of defence equipment with orders running as high as USD 1.5 billion last year.
It said this constituted about 50 per cent of Israeli defence exports and about 30 per cent of India armament imports. Despite its defence industry facing financial crunch, Russia continues to be the main weapons supplier to India, constituting 35 per cent of Indian weapon imports. Moscow's arms exports to India range from fighters to warships and spares.
Israeli firms have already supplied India with frontline weapons systems like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Army, Navy and Airforce, night vision devices for army, Travor range of hand weapons for special forces, close battlefield radars like Loros.
Tel Aviv has also bagged an Indian order for supply of three Airborne Early Warning and Air Control System aircraft to the IAF. A follow up order is expected after the first of these aircrarft are delivered later this year.