India's warship building worries

The Indian Navy will commission the stealth frigate INS Mahendragiri in Visakhapatnam on Saturday. The vessel is the sixth of Project 17A Nilgiri class frigates, and the fourth new naval ship to be commissioned in less than a month.

On June 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commissioned the stealth frigate INS Dunagiri, the survey vessel INS Sanshodak and the ASW shallow-water craft INS Agray. These inductions reflect an impressive naval acquisition drumbeat, with a new vessel being inducted every 40 days on an average. Over a dozen naval vessels were inducted last year and a record 19 inductions targeted this year.

The last foreign-built warship, the INS Tamal, was commissioned in Russia last year. The navy plans to meet its goal of a 200-warship navy by 2035, all from Indian shipyards. The 140-ship Indian Navy currently has over 50 platforms under construction — these include two nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBN), two nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSN), five fleet support ships, and over a dozen corvettes and support vessels.

But beneath the euphoria of multiple vessel inductions lies a thin order book — at least 50 warships are still stuck in design and approval stages. This means it will be some years before steel is cut on new platforms and several more years before they are inducted.

The consequence of these delays is that this is the first time in several years that the Indian Navy doesn’t have an aircraft carrier, conventional submarine, destroyer or frigate under construction. It is yet to get an approval to build a second indigenous aircraft carrier. Last year, the defence ministry cleared the acquisition of four Landing Platform Dock (LPD) ships, mini aircraft-carriers which can embark helicopters and soldiers, but it will be at least three years before orders are placed and formal construction begins.

A $10 billion programme to buy six conventional submarines and another one to acquire Mine Counter Measure Vessels (MCMV), might be signed this year after being in the pipeline for close to two decades. The Next Generation Frigate (NGF) and Next Generation Destroyer (NGD) were to be finalised by 2019, but are still in design stage. And since Indian shipyards take 6–8 years to build first-of-class warships, new destroyers and frigates will start to be inducted only around the mid-2030s. These delays risk creating capability gaps as older warships retire.

This procedural bottleneck comes at a time when land conflicts have spilled into the maritime domain, threatening India’s sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), re-emphasising the case for a strong navy. Nearly 95 per cent of India’s trade by value and 70 per cent by volume and 85 per cent of its energy imports flow through the seas. India’s maritime vulnerabilities are being probed in the West Asia conflict which began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas massacred Israeli civilians. Iran and its proxies unleash ‘chokepoint warfare’ on global commons, first, the Houthis used anti-ship ballistic missiles, drones and unmanned surface vessels to target US and Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aden and in 2026, Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz.

Further east, China today fields the world’s largest navy in numbers, it surpassed the US Navy in 2020, and now fields a battle force of over 370 platforms and growing. The PLA Navy has embarked on the largest naval expansion post the Cold War, it adds one Indian Navy to its fleet every five years, complete with aircraft carriers, SSBNs, destroyers, and frigates.

Naval analysts conclude it could only be a matter of time before the PLAN augments its permanent presence in India’s backyard, the Indian Ocean region. Naval analysts like Rear Admiral Raja Menon make the case for a vastly expanded naval force comprising destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarines to deter China from launching a conflict. “Today, you can build a ship with a land attack capability, anti-submarine capability, anti-ship capability and anti-missile capability all in the same hull. We must exploit that advantage,“ he says.

He calls for India to field at least 6,000 to 8,000 vertical launch missile silos , of which the Navy can comfortably field 4,000— 3,000 on board destroyers and 1,000 on board SSNs.

SOCIALIST SHIPYARDS

Procedural delays are only part of the problem. Even if decision-making is speeded up and budgets increased, bottlenecks in India’s defence shipbuilding sector will prevent timely deliveries. More than 90 % of warships and submarines are produced by six PSU shipyards- Mazagon Docks Ltd, Goa Shipyard Ltd, Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE), Cochin Shipyard Ltd and Hindustan Shipyard Ltd (HSL). Systemic issues within these shipyards haven’t been addressed in decades— shipyards that haven’t been modernised in years, this has resulted in slow build rates and cost overruns.

Shipyards continue as they did during socialist India, nominated to produce warships, which means contracts are handed out without competition. Because there is no competitive bidding, price discovery is not known and costs overruns are not uncommon. All of these costs are borne by the government.

Shipyards do not use the modern Hull Block Construction Method (HBCM), where the ship is built multiple prefabricated modular sections, built, outfitted and painted simultaneously before final assembly. Modular construction drastically reduces commissioning time and lowers costs but not a single Indian defence shipyard uses this technique.

Warships are built in India, as they have been for decades, slowly and sequentially— two years to build the hull and launch in the water when around 30 per cent complete, another three to four years to fit out machinery, equipment and weapons and sensors, and finally sea trials lasting up to a year. The entire process from keel-laying to induction could take between six to eight years.

(The INS Mahendragiri, it must be mentioned, is an outlier — it was built by MDL in a near-record time of just four years).

In sharp contrast, China’s brutally efficient shipyards deliver one new Type 055 destroyer, from keel-laying to launch, in just 2.5 years. Japan’s newest Mogami-class frigate was delivered to the Japanese Navy this month, in less than three years.

Since Indian shipyards are not competitive on price and time, India is unable to export major warships, among the most powerful ways to build leverage among the IOR countries. India’s export list is dismal, a dozen smaller naval platforms, patrol vessels and fast attack craft — to friendly countries like Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Seychelles. It has yet to export larger platforms like corvettes, frigates or destroyers.

Naval analysts like Rear Admiral Monty Khanna believe India needs to seriously consider the merger of its five PSU shipyards. “They could be brought under a single management and operate as one company with different production facilities such as the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) or the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), there would be tremendous gains for all stakeholders,” he wrote in a 2018 Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS) paper.

As Admiral Khanna notes, concentrating shipbuilding capabilities into a few could result in reducing infrastructure deficits, solve labour shortages with a transferable and relocatable workforce, reduce overheads through resource pooling, and the size of the merged entities would make it easier to nurture a set of reliable vendors willing to creating capacities to fulfil larger orders, which would lead to price reduction. A merged entity would also become more attractive for disinvestment. This is where global shipping giants are headed towards.

In 2025, China created the world’s largest shipbuilding entity, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), with 530 vessel orders, 54 million deadweight tons and projected revenues of around $18 billion. The Russian Federation unified all its shipyards into just one, the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), in 2007. The US has just four shipbuilding companies.

THE TECHNOLOGY TRAP

The Indian Navy hopes to become fully self-sufficient or Atmanirbhar in all respects by 2047. It was the first service to realise the need to build its own platforms, over half-a-century ago. It built India’s first major defence platform, the INS Nilgiri in 1972. In 1984 it drove a program build a series of four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, India’s greatest military technological breakthrough. It was the first service to fire guided missiles in combat, in 1971, the first service to induct the supersonic Brahmos missiles in 2001, and in the mid-1990s, gave the struggling Light Combat Aircraft program a new lease of life with funding support.

Behind its commitment to indigenisation lies a massive fleet of special organisations — the Weapons and Electronics Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE), the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV), the Directorate of Indigenisation, Directorates of Electrical, Marine and Naval Architecture, the Warship Design Bureau to design warships and submarines, the Directorate of Ship Production, Directorate of Staff Requirements, and the Warship Overseeing Team. The Navy is the only service with similar structures. These organisations have served the Indian Navy extremely well. But the service will need to invest heavily for the road ahead.

The 6700-ton destroyer INS Delhi was India’s first indigenously designed and built destroyer when it was commissioned in 1997. It can be called the ‘Vishwakarma hull’ as its hull form, propulsion integration philosophy, and weapons fit architecture have directly informed all major ship classes since then.

But a quick scan of the Delhi’s principal weapons and equipment today, would worry proponents of indigenisation — the vessel is powered by Ukranian gas turbines, carries American helicopters, Israeli sensors, Russian radars and missiles. All countries which are fighting wars of their own in 2026.

The dependencies have only been slightly altered since then— US-built gas turbines have replaced Ukranian gas turbines, Israeli radars and air defence missiles have replaced Russian radars and missiles. The Delhi class destroyers and Shivalik class frigates were conceived in the post Cold War world of the 1990s and interdependencies and global supply chains. They could become liabilities in today’s world of great power competition and weaponised supply chains. Propulsion is the navy’s Achilles heel, and it needs to get there quickly. BHEL has begun a project to indigenise the 40 MW Zorya engines to power future warships and destroyers. Kirloskar is developing an indigenous diesel engine where 70 per cent of development costs are being funded by the Navy.

Naval aviation platforms are another area of import dependency. The Indian Navy’s entire anti-submarine warfare architecture is of US-origin, these include P-8I Poseidons, MH-60R helicopters and MQ-9 Predator drones.

Some of the current bottlenecks can be traced to critically understaffed specialist organisations. India’s team of naval designers is in double-digits, the US and China have thousands of design specialists for warships and submarines. A 1,000-crore project for a naval ship design certification agency greelit by Manohar Parrikar in 2017, has been a non-starter.

This means India still relies on western nations to certify its ship and submarine designs. Most naval technology development is directly linked to specific platforms. Crucially, the navy does not have independent technology development projects like for instance those related to electric drive systems or ship-based lasers, technologies vital for quieter warships with the ability to protect themselves from drone swarms. It needs a dedicated technology development fund to develop technologies, equipment and systems independent of any project. The Indian Navy faces formidable challenges in the years ahead, but it is nothing the service cannot overcome.

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