The company has provided specialist equipment to the Indian Army to break into terrorist radio networks operating across the LoC.
PARIS: The hush of quiet efficiency is almost palpable as you walk down the gleaming corridors of the Thales Research and Technology Centre on the outskirts of Paris — and cross-border terrorism in distant Kashmir is the last thing on your mind. Yet, it is in the sanitised laboratories and professorial rooms of this sprawling, ultra-modern facility that some of the high-tech tools that Indian troops use to combat insurgents from Pakistan have been devised and developed.
For instance, it is at this centre on the campus of the Ecole Polytechnique, about an hour's drive from Paris, that Thales, the French electronics, defence and aerospace major, developed the Sophie hand-held thermal imager that helps Indian troops detect cross-border incursions in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Army already possesses some 600 such devices, deployed mostly in Kashmir, and the Border Security Force is believed to be interested in the imager that detects infiltrators as far as two to three kilometres away, using the radiation their bodies emit.
The Sophie could be hand-held or tripod mounted and is the size of a handycam. And its external video and control interfaces allow it to be operated autonomously in applications demanding remote control and monitoring. All these technical details came from Jean-Pascal Duchemin, a senior scientist at the centre. On Monday he took a team of visiting Indian journalists around the facility.
“Some of the most state-of-the art equipment in the field of optronics is being developed here,” said Duchemin, whose enthusiasm completely belies his age.
It is here, in this facility with some 240 permanent staffers, that Thales also developed the night vision equipment that are now part of the army’s T-90 and T-72 tanks. And the company has also provided specialist equipment to the Army to break into terrorist radio networks operating across the Line of Control as also devices using electronic measures that prevent its own networks from being jammed by militants. Thales, which deploys a third of its total workforce in research and spends almost 15 per cent of its euro 10 billion revenues on R&D.
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