Indian industry is actively involved in defence production, says chief of Mazgaon Docks

Very few people know about it, but warship and submarine building in India has been growing by leaps and bounds and will soon come of age with the impending commission-ing of totally indigenous vessels . vessels fitted with Indian-built wea-pons systems.

This silent revolution has been helped in no small measure by the active participation of Indian industry which has been supplying an increasingly large number of components that are fitted into frigates, destroyers, submarines and so on, thus heralding the happy marriage of the public and the private sectors in India.s defence preparedness.

Stating this at the last meeting, Vice-Admiral S.K.K. Krishnan, Chairman and Managing Director of Mazgaon Docks Ltd., who was speaking on .Warship and submarine-building in India., revealed that his company had placed orders worth Rs. 3,200 crores with Indian industries.

.Our projects are very big, but Rs. 3,200 crores for Indian industry is not a small amount either. Indian industry has met its challenges and is producing fairly reliable and good items now..

Pointing out that it was only in 1960 that the government had decided in favour of self-reliance in ship-building and the actual work started in 1966, he said in the 40 years since then, three (public sector) shipyards had delivered 80 ships and two submarines.

.This is a great achievement in technological terms. We have learnt the art of warship design. The detailing is perfect and we have been able to construct what we want.

.Five years from now, we will be able to say proudly that we can build our own warships and submarines. Quietly but surely, we are not only building ships, we are building the nation..

Vice-Admiral Krishnan, an engineering graduate from Madras University, was commissioned in the Indian Navy in August, 1968. A postgraduate in warship propulsion system design from the Naval Academy, St. Petersburg, Russia, he also has a post-graduate diploma in systems management from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management, Mumbai.

According to Dev Thukral, who introduced the speaker, Vice-Admiral Krishnan has served with almost all important establishments, including the Naval Dockyards in Mumbai and Vizag; the Mazgaon Dockyard; INS Shivaji, Lonavla; and Naval Headquarters, New Delhi.

On promotion to the flag rank, he was appointed Chief Staff Officer (Technical) at the Western Naval Command in Mumbai. He also served as Director, Defence Machinery Design Establishment, Hyderabad; as Admiral Superintendent of the Naval Dockyard, Mumbai; and as Controller of Personnel Services at Naval Headquarters, New Delhi.

Recipient of the Ati Vishishta Seva (AVSM) and the Vishishta Seva Medals (VSM), he left the Navy on being selected as CMD of Mazgaon Docks Ltd. and took up the assignment on January 1, 2006. (Mazgaon Docks is the premier shipyard under the Defence Ministry, with over 7,000 personnel.)

In the course of his presentation, Vice-Admiral Krishnan praised industry.s participation in the niche field of building warships. .It is not only that (we) the shipbuilders are building. We have had tremendous participation from Indian industry..

Kirloskar Oil Engines supplied diesel engines; Cummins made generators; the Naval Dockyard provided boilers; and Bharat Electronics supplied all the electronics on board the ships, including the communications and the electronic sur-veillance systems.

L&T came up with a large portion of the hydraulic equipment, as also some of the missile launchers and weapons mountings; other companies supplied gas turbines; and shafting and propellers were made by a variety of manufacturers.

Apart from these big names, small and medium enterprises also played a significant role in developing several items, from reverse osmosis plants to pumps, oil-water separators, air-conditioning plants, .you name it and we have made it in India; it is not only us, but a number of other ind-ustries have grown with us..

Highlighting the fact that orders worth over Rs. 3,200 crores had been placed with Indian industry, Vice- Admiral Krishnan said many items were .being developed for the first time. These will go through a series of trials and tests before being put on board. We have the patience and the perseverance to go along with them..

Thanks to the (booming) economy and the Defence budget, the future was well defined. There was a definite path ahead and the way to go about achieving the goals was also clear. Significantly, foreign dependence was continuously decreasing.

.Till recently, we were dependent on foreign nations for weapons systems. Even today, for what we are building, the weapons systems are coming from abroad. But on the destroyers being built right now the Brahmos missile system, which is totally indigenous, is being installed... and general electric gas turbines manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics are being put in place..

Besides, India .is now also producing the new generation of Barak missile systems. the design work is already on and we will start. (manufacturing) it indigenously.

.Thus, very soon even the weapons system will be completely indigenous. The electronics, communications systems, sensors, sonars, radars and so on are already totally indigenous. Five years from now, we will be able to say proudly that we can build our own warships and submarines..

Vice-Admiral Krishnan had started his presentation by noting that very little was known about warshipbuilding in India, unlike the aviation industry where advances in light combat aircraft, missile systems and other things were constantly written about. But warship-building .occupied a very quiet corner. and few people talked about it.

Just what was a warship? It was very different from a merchant ship, an ordinary ship or a passenger liner. It had an extremely compact platform, with a large number of sensors and weapons (in that order) in place.

The sensors actually identified or detected the enemy and also .heard. communications picked up with the help of electronic surveillance means. Next came the radars, the sonars for underwater sensing, ESM systems for electronic sensing of the enemy and various communications systems.

Also fitted on board were several offensive weapons. A normal warship, a frigate or a destroyer, was packed with weapons systems . guns (right and forward); surface-to-surface missiles; surface-to-air missiles; a missile-guiding radar; sensors; antiaircraft guns, also called rapid-firing close-in weapons systems; an antimissile defence mechanism, also called an .anti-missile missile.; a torpedo launcher; and a hangar for two helicopters used extensively for war against submarines.

No other defence equipment packed so much hardware on just one platform; and this had to be weighed against the fact that the normal displacement (or weight) of a frigate was about 4,500 to 5,000 tonnes, while that of a destroyer (bigger and with more weapons) was about 6,500 to 7,000 tonnes.

But these were only the weapons and sensors required for its mission. For its own sustenance, for being at sea for a long time and supporting its crew, it had several other systems, including an amazingly large number of fighting systems, a hydraulic system, an HPA system and so on.

What about power? Every vessel had to have its own power management; a frigate generated about 5 MW power for its own use and 25 MW for propulsion. Thus, 25 to 30 MW of power was generated on board.

As if this were not enough, there had to be accommodation for the crew, fire detection and extinguishing system, seawater cooling systems, propulsion and shafting gear and a variety of other systems, all put together on the same compact platform.

To top it all, a sea-faring vessel was rarely static. The platform itself moved on the waves in the sea in all three directions and was also subjected to great shocks whenever any explosion took place near by.

In other words, Vice-Admiral Krishnan said, shipbuilders had to ensure detailed designing of all systems and put them on board in such a manner that they functioned for about 30 years. Some of the electronics would be updated during this period, but the basic platformrelated systems had to run for 30 years.

Turning to submarines, he said these were .a totally different kettle of fish.. Warship building was difficult, no doubt, but building a submarine was far tougher and it was the yardstick by which to measure the technological prowess of a country.

.Look at aviation. Though it is supposed to be hi-tech, there are many countries that are building warplanes or normal planes. But you can count the number of countries building submarines on your fingers . there are not more than ten..

The reason for this was, once again, the fact that a large number of weapons systems had to be packed into a single pressure hull which had to be made with considerable accuracy so that it worked well under water; it had to ooze reliability so that the crew felt safe and could dive to unimaginable depths for days on end.

Mazgaon Docks had been making submarines since the 1980.s. .Dev Thukral was one of the pioneers at that time.. Two German-designed HDW submarines were built at first, the last being commissioned in 1994. The shipyard then took a break, but it was now back in business and busy making another six submarines.

A submarine was far more compact. One could barely walk through or sit at one place; although there was a small kitchenette, little cooking was done and the crew mostly ate tinned food for days on end. .It is like being closed in a trench, buried underground, or under water, and left like that for many days. Sometimes, even your breathing becomes difficult..

The pressure hull of a submarine was almost two inches thick and made of a very special grade of steel. It had to be bent in an accurate shape, in a diameter of nearly six and a half metres.

.We work in accuracies of microns. We can.t have an accuracy of less than one mm. Anything that is not absolutely circular is likely to collapse when subjected to pressure under water. .

Turning to the history of Indian shipbuilding, Vice-Admiral Krishnan said after the government decided to go indigenous and build self-reliance in 1960, it acquired Mazgaon Docks (till then jointly owned by Scindia Steamship and P&O) and Garden Reach Shipyard in Calcutta; the Goa Shipyard functioned as a subsidiary of Mazgaon Docks till well into the 1970.s.

After taking over these three shipyards, the government bought a design for a Leander class frigate from Yarrows in the UK. The entire set of drawings was acquired and the staff trained there in the art of shipbuilding. India started its own shipbuilding in 1966 and commissioned its first Leander class frigate, the .Nilgiri., in 1972.

Six such frigates were built, but by the time the fourth was completed, modifications and alterations had already started. .We modified the fifth and sixth to accommodate a larger helicopter and better weapon system..

Meanwhile, at Garden Reach, India built her own design, a seaward defence boat. A small group of naval architects in Delhi formed the nucleus for the Directorate of Naval Design, which later become the Directorate- General of Naval Design (a very large organisation now). It was the first project to build a seaward defence boat, a small, entirely indigenous vessel.

Then came a major success story, the .Godavari. class, an improvement on the Leander. The hull was enlarged and more weapons systems were put in place.

The .Godavari. had a surface-tosurface missile, a surface-to-air missile, close-in weapons systems, a shaft launcher and excellent sensors. Above all, it had two Sea King helicopters so that it could actually fight a war with a submarine more effectively.

Though the ship was bigger, the tonnage 600 to 700 tonnes more than the Leander, it worked on the same propulsion system and attained the same top speed. That made the world sit up and take the Indian warship building industry more seriously.

.Till then they said you are only copying a few drawings and making something. But this was something quite different. the design was entirely indigenous, done mostly in Delhi, and the detailing was done here in Mazgaon Docks. It was such a success that we followed it up later on in Garden Reach..

Apart from all this, Vice-Admiral Krishnan said, Mazgaon Docks made seven offshore patrol vessels for the Coast Guards. And Hindustan Shipyard at Vishakhapatanam used a different design to build four.

Mazgaon also went for missile boats. It bought the designs and made missile boats that were successfully used in the 1971 war against Pakistan. And after acquiring the designs for a later version, it helped build 13 missile boats, four at Mazgaon Docks and the rest at the Goa Shipyard.

Next in line was a landing ship tank, to assist in landing troops directly on shore with a beaching vessel; .it went directly to the beach, the front door opened and a tank or any other vehicle could easily roll out..

However, the pride of place went to the .Delhi. class, the largest war vessel built in India. Mazgaon Docks had already built three and was building another three.

.This is a very, very powerful destroyer. It has gone around the world and has been highly acclaimed by almost everyone who has seen it for its absolute pure design, for its powerful weapons systems and for its sheer robustness. You just walk on it and you feel that you are on a real .man of war.. It has got power..

Meanwhile, at Cochin Shipyard work was apace on an air-defence ship (aircraft carrier) which received more media attention because of the size and the type of the project.

Vice-Admiral Krishnan concluded by stating that while two submarines had been built in the past, another six were under construction. It took six years to build, hence the first would be delivered only in the year 2012.

Answering questions, he said the US Navy was the world leader and made the largest number of hightechnology vessels; besides, it continued experimenting with newer technologies. The Russians had been left far behind and the Chinese were now building a large number of vessels; earlier, they bought submarines and destroyers from Russia.

Speaking on the cost effect-iveness of Indian ships, he said once India deployed its own indigenously designed missile and other weapons systems, the costs would fall even further.

Bringing the question-answer session to an end, President Rumi Jehangir noted that one of the ancillary benefits that medicine had derived from defence was that several of the technologies used in defence were also used in medical diagnostic fields, such as radar and ultra-sonography for the diagnosis of interior diseases.

In the field of ophthalmology, there was a story from the good old days when, after the removal of cataracts, the glasses (or spectacles) were used outside (in front of the eyes). But in 1949, a student asked Dr. Harold Ridley why he didn.t put the lens back in. That was when he started thinking of devising a marble-like lens that could be inserted inside the eye.

When a search was launched for an inert material, it was noted that during World War II when anti-aircraft guns attacked fighter bombers, their plastic canopies would shatter and pieces of plastic entered the body of the pilots. That plastic was found to be totally inert and transparent. .The material from the canopy (PMMA, a plastic polymer) is still used today (for making intra-ocular lens implants) and has stood the test of time..

The vote of thanks was proposed by PP Arun Sanghi. .

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