The paper said India has widely been viewed as having one of the fastest-growing navies in the world. Its fleet of about 120 vessels, many of them supplied by Russia since India’s independence from Great Britain 64 years ago, is the fifth largest in the world.
Yet, military experts fret about the age of its hardware and the slow pace of its replacement, in spite of the country being identified as one of the world’s biggest buyers of arms.
Baba Kalyani, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s national committee on defence and aerospace, estimated that half of the equipment held by India’s armed forces was obsolete.
Indian naval planners have ambitious targets to launch 100 new warships over the next decade as they respond to what they view as a growing threat to maritime supremacy in the Indian Ocean.
New Delhi has plans to operate three aircraft carriers, and two years ago launched an indigenously built-nuclear powered submarine built on a Russian design.
The report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, tabled in parliament last week, throws India’s ambitions into serious doubt.
It highlights the weak capabilities of shipyards like Mumbai’s Mazagon
Docks, Goa Shipyard and Calcutta’s Garden Reach Shipbuilders to meet military targets. The state-owned yards are able to produce four ships a year, the report said.
The assessment said that by next year the navy would only have 44 per cent of destroyers it had expected and 20 per cent of anti-submarine corvettes. Lead ships in India’s modernisation programme were delivered as much as five years after their original delivery date.
It also lambasted the Ministry of Defence for its inaccurate estimation of costs, which led to severe cost escalation during the building of the new fleet.
FT further stated that the official audit coincides with stinging criticism of India’s military for the expansion of privately run golf courses on army land.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Auditor slams Indian Navy
India’s state auditor has criticised the modernisation of the country’s navy, warning that delays and ballooning costs in its shipyards are severely diminishing its fighting capacity, reports ‘Financial Times’.The official auditor warned that India’s maritime power was falling because of poor performance of state-owned shipyards, ‘ad hoc’ financial management and shortages of appropriate building materials.“The strength of warships in the Indian navy has been stagnating anddespite construction of warships indigenously, the Indian navy is facing large shortfalls against its planned levels,” it said.In spite of forecasts that the Indian navy will see dramatic growth in the next decade, the report says more ships are being decommissioned than are being launched.
“The Navy’s force levels are on the decline. This has ironically come at a time when the responsibilities of the navy are growing significantly.”
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