Ship Shape

Cmde Anil Jai Singh (retd)

The commissioning of INS Nilgiri on the 3 June 1972 marked a historic moment in the storied tradition of Indian shipbuilding. It was the first major warship (based on the British Leander class design) built in India at the Mazagon Docks Ltd, Mumbai. It also realised the vision of India’s post-Independence naval planners of the Indian Navy becoming a leading blue water navy, with an indigenous ship building capability.

In the five decades since, the country has not looked back and is today, one of only six countries in the world to have built an indigenous aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. The ability to build these complex platforms places India amongst the leading warship builders in the world. However, the same is not true of indigenous commercial shipbuilding where India still has a very long way to go. This striking dichotomy is not peculiar only to India but is also prevalent in many other countries as 90 per cent of the global commercial shipbuilding market is controlled by just three countries--China, Japan and South Korea. While the momentum of warship construction is continuing apace in India, an effort is now being made to revive the commercial shipbuilding eco-system in India to include not only shipbuilding, but also ship repair and ship recycling.

The success of India’s warship building capability has been possible due to the close coordination between the government, public and private industry, the Indian Navy, the Indian atomic energy establishment, and the research and development organisations, both in the defence and the civilian sectors. As India seeks its rightful place on the global high table in an increasingly competitive and perhaps confrontational geopolitical environment, it will have to focus its attention on other dimensions of its maritime power and mitigate any strategic vulnerability to its national interests anywhere across the globe.

Shipbuilding Heritage

India’s documented shipbuilding history dates back to the pre-Christian era. Indian seafarers had trade relations with the ancient Mesopotamia and Rome in the west and with China and other Southeast Asian nations in the east. This tradition of shipbuilding continued till as recently as the 19^th century with Indian master shipbuilders in Mumbai building ships for the Royal Navy. HMS Trincomalee, built in Mumbai in 1817 is presently the second oldest floating warship in the world and is berthed at Hartlepool in the UK. The decline of India’s rich shipbuilding tradition began with the first Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century when the transformation in shipbuilding from wood to steel and from sail to steam took place. The British ensured that the Industrial Revolution passed India by with the country reduced to being a mere source of raw materials for industries in Great Britain and thereafter a lucrative market for its finished goods.

It was only after India became independent that the visionary leadership of the Indian Navy, realising the importance of the maritime domain, envisaged a powerful navy for the country, and began encouraging the existing shipyards to focus their attention on building warships. The first Indian-built warship was a small anti-submarine warfare corvette, INS Ajay, commissioned in 1965. However, it was the Nilgiri that triggered indigenous warship construction from which the country has never looked back. Nilgiri was followed by five more Leander class ships, each one an improved version of its predecessor and suitably adapted to meet the IN’s requirements. The last two of this class of six ships, INS Taragiri and Vindhyagiri were modified to an extent where they were able to carry a 10-tonne Sea King helicopter as compared to the previous four which were restricted to the ubiquitous Indian Navy workhorse, the 2.5 tonne Chetak, formerly French Allouette-3. These six ships were followed in the 1980s by three Godavari class frigates, which adapted the basic fundamentals of the Leander design, but were larger and included four surface to surface missile (SSM) launchers and could carry two Sea King helicopters each. Both these classes of ships served in the navy for over three decades.

Aircraft carrier INS Vikrant has been built at Cochin Shipyard Ltd

India’s frigate building programme has continued to deliver impressive platforms ever since, with the Brahmaputra class in the early 2000s, followed by an incremental stealth capability in the subsequent frigates of the Shivalik class (Type 17) and the follow-on Type 17A, seven of which are currently under construction at MDL Mumbai and Garden Reach Shipping and Engineering (GRSE), Kolkata. In the 1990s, India’s indigenous effort achieved two significant milestones--the indigenous construction of two submarines of the German Type 209 class especially designed to meet India’s bespoke requirements. Built at MDL, INS Shalki and INS Shankul were commissioned in 1992 and 1994 respectively and continue to provide the cutting edge to the navy’s frontline offensive capability.

In 1997, another landmark was achieved with the commissioning of INS Delhi, the first of three Project 15 guided missile destroyers displacing over 7,000 tons. These ships were a quantum advancement over the existing designs in terms of size, displacement, design and firepower. These were followed by three