New Delhi: India should look much beyond the planned 24 submarines under a 30-year plan and embark on building many more such underwater vessels, Union defence minister Manohar Parrikar said on Tuesday.
Referring to the country’s existing 30-year submarine construction plan that aims to build 24 nuclear and conventional vessels by 2030, Mr Parrikar called for a “rethink” and said India needed a long-term plan till 2050 as many more submarines needed to be built.
The minister, speaking at a Ficci event here, drew a comparison of the submarine construction programmes in other countries and said Russia has built 595 submarines till date while the US has constructed 285 submarines.
While ruing the indigenisation content on the Scorpene projects, Mr Parrikar said the underwater platforms built under the aegis of Advanced Technology Vessel Project (ATVP) had achieved an indigenisation content of more than 70 per cent.
The Navy is critically short of submarines, with 14 operational platforms, including one nuclear attack submarine leased from Russia. But with regular maintenance and high turnaround times the actual availability is much less.
“Indigenisation in Scorpenes is not up to the mark, but in the advanced technology vessel (ATV) programme (nuclear submarines) it is over 70 per cent,” he said.
After coming to power in June 2014, the BJP-led NDA government has cleared more than Rs 2 lakh crore worth of defence acquisitions and has plans to top Rs 3 lakh crore by the March 2017.
The minister also declared that the Request for Proposal for the much awaited P75(I) program, under which six more conventional submarines are to be built with the help of private sector will be under the Strategic Partnership (SP) Model. The P75(I) project will be fast-tracked after gaining the requisite approvals.
The defence minister rued the fact that unlike the ongoing nuclear submarine project, the indigenisation on the Scorpene projects is very low (30-40 per cent).
