Bangalore:A consortium of French defence and aerospace companies led by Thales has put ina formal bid for upgrading the Mirage 2000 fighters of the Indian Air Force(IAF).

"A team from Thales met with defence ministry officials lastweek to discuss the finer points of the proposed upgrade and also submitted aformal proposal to increase the life of the aircraft, inducted by the IAF inthe 1980s, by around 20-25 years," officials said.

"If we are given the go ahead today, we should be ableto retrofit the first set of two aircraft in two years," a senior Thalesofficial, here for the Aero India show, told sources.

"Then one can look attwo-three aircraft a month,"he said.

The IAF has 52 Mirage 2000s in three squadrons.

The French consortium for Mirage upgrade includes Dassault,which shut down the production line for Mirage 2000s some five years ago. TheFrench company is also in the race for selling 126 multi-role combat aircraft,Renault, to the IAF for replacing the ageing MiG-21 fleet.

The other five aircraft in the race are F-16 of LockheedMartin, F-18 of Boeing, both of which are based in the US, Grippen from Sweden,MiG-29 from Russiaand Eurofighter of Britain.

"We are keen on upgrading our Mirage 2000s since itwill complement our fleet of SU-30s. We realise we will not get the new fleetof multi-role combat aircraft before 2011 or 2012," a defence ministryofficial said.

The IAF had approached Thales for in 2005 to upgrade theavionics of Mirage 2000 as also its fleet operational capability and theair-to-air and the air-to-ground missile superiority for taking on multipletargets.

Thales has been providing avionics and other high-technologysystems to most aircraft of the IAF, including the Mirage 2000, SU-30s andMIG-29K as well as aircraft carrier Gorshkov.

At present, seven countries, including India, fly the Mirage 2000 - Egypt, France, Greece,Peru, Qatar, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates(UAE). Of them, France, Greece and theUAE, have opted for Thales upgrades.

Indiaalso had a proposal to buy the Mirage 2000 from Qatar, but is said to have missedthe bus, aerospace industry officials said on the margins of the Aero Indiashow.