Built In Kolkata: Modi's Atmanirbhar Bharat Story In Steel

Last Updated:June 21, 2026, 15:22 IST

Three warships sliding into commission on the Hooghly matter because of what they are built to do

Today, on June 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood on the banks of the Hooghly in Kolkata and commissioned three Indian Navy warships built entirely on Indian soil. The Indian Navy inducted three indigenously built frontline platforms, Dunagiri, Sanshodhak, and Agray, at Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers, the public sector yard that built all three vessels from keel to commissioning.

This was not a routine handover. It landed at a moment when the Navy’s underwater and surveillance gaps in the Indian Ocean have become a strategic worry.

Three ships, three jobs

Dunagiri

The Navy ordered seven Project 17A frigates, four from Mazagon Dock and three from GRSE. Dunagiri is the fifth one out, the second built at Garden Reach. Six of the seven frigates have now been delivered. The seventh, Vindhyagiri, is due in 2027. It carries BrahMos missiles and the Medium Range Surface-to-Air Missile system, so it can hit ships and shoot down incoming aircraft or missiles. The Navy has already signed off on a follow-up class, Project 17B, worth around Rs 70,000 crore, bigger frigates with more firepower once this batch wraps up.

Sanshodhak

Sanshodhak is the fourth and last ship in the Survey Vessel (Large) class. GRSE signed the contract for all four back in 2018. The other three, Sandhayak, Nirdeshak and Ikshak, are already in service. This one finishes the order. Its job is mapping ports, channels and the deep ocean floor, using underwater vehicles and sonar gear. Although less visible than a frontline combatant, the capability is strategically significant.

Agray

Agray is the fifth of eight Arnala-class anti-submarine boats GRSE is building, a contract worth a bit over Rs 6,300 crore. Three vessels remain under construction, and the last one, Ajay, is already launched. Cochin Shipyard is building eight more of a similar type, the Mahe class, so the Navy ends up with sixteen of these in total. Agray is built for shallow water, armed with torpedoes, anti-submarine rockets and sonar.

Why the Navy needs these ships now

China has had more submarines moving through the Indian Ocean over the past decade, and the Navy has had to adjust to that. Tracking what’s happening underwater is now treated as seriously as tracking what’s on the surface, as Chinese deployments in the region keep growing. Agray is built for that job, working shallow coastal waters with the sonar and torpedoes needed to find and hit a submarine close to shore, an area the Navy has been thin on for years.

The seabed itself has become contested terrain. Chinese survey and research vessels have been actively mapping the Indian Ocean’s undersea terrain, a deployment New Delhi reads as part of Beijing’s effort to sharpen its own oceanographic and submarine intelligence picture. A hydrographic vessel like Sanshodhak helps India build an independent picture of its own waters and contested approaches. Knowing the ocean floor better than a rival is now part of undersea deterrence, not a side benefit of it.

Sea lane security adds a third pressure point. India’s surveillance push, including a separate plan to expand its long-range P-8I patrol fleet, reflects growing concern inside the Navy over submarine activity, maritime competition, and surveillance gaps across the wider Indo-Pacific, with officials concluding that persistent maritime domain awareness has become indispensable rather than optional. Dunagiri’s missile and air-defence fit gives the Navy a frontline escort capable of protecting merchant traffic and naval task groups moving through these same waters. Together, the three commissionings cover strike power, seabed knowledge, and undersea defence in a single ceremony, which is an unusually complete answer to an unusually layered threat picture.

A shipyard that has earned the moment

None of this would mean much if the platforms had to be sourced abroad. The three ships, delivered to the Navy on 30 March 2026, take GRSE’s total tally to 118 warships built, of which 80 have gone to the Indian Navy. The yard has also exported warships and won commercial export orders, and was elevated to Navratna status this year on the strength of that record, evidence that the same capability now feeds a genuine export pipeline rather than staying confined to domestic orders.

What indigenisation actually looks like

The phrase Atmanirbhar Bharat gets used loosely, often as shorthand for any deal favouring a domestic vendor. This commissioning is a more precise illustration. The three platforms carry indigenous content exceeding 75 percent, with construction drawing in more than 200 Indian MSMEs. That figure separates a ship assembled from imported parts under an Indian flag from one that is actually designed and built at home, sensors, weapons integration and hull included. Indigenous defence production under the leadership of Modi has gone from Rs 46,429 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 1.78 lakh crore in 2025-26, and defence exports have jumped from Rs 686 crore to a record Rs 38,424 crore over the same decade. That growth didn’t happen on its own. Tools like the Positive Indigenisation Lists have banned imports on over 15,700 defence items, and the SRIJAN portal now has more than 41,000 vendors registered to feed components into domestic defence manufacturing. Three ships commissioned at one shipyard in Kolkata are a small slice of that decade-long push, they’re a slice that shows the policy actually working.

The bottom line

Three warships sliding into commission on the Hooghly matter because of what they are built to do, not just where they were built. The commissioning highlights two parallel trends shaping India’s maritime strategy: the need to monitor an increasingly contested Indian Ocean and the push to build the capabilities required to do so at home.The harder test is whether GRSE can

sustain this indigenisation rate and delivery pace as the Navy’s requirements grow more complex, and whether export wins scale into a durable international business rather than staying occasional. For the Navy, the induction marks another step in closing long-standing gaps in surveillance, undersea warfare and fleet support.

About the Author

Vallari Parashar

Vallari Parashar is a Senior Sub Editor at News18. She writes on geopolitics, defence, and strategic affairs

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