New Delhi: A Russian nuclear submarine leased by India is about to leave its yard and reach the country next month after a three-year delay, a source in the defence establishment said today. The Akula II class Nerpa was to have been delivered on a 10-year lease for about $920 million by 2009. But a fire in the submarine that killed 20 sailors during trials in 2008 and, later in 2010, a complaint by the Indian Navy that its crew was not adequately trained are among the reasons that have caused the delay.
But the Russians are understood to have assured India during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Moscow in the third week of this month that the Nerpa is ready to set sail. The Nerpa will be re-christened INS Chakra after the first nuclear submarine leased by India that was returned to Russia after a similar 10-year lease in 1991.
The Indian Navy had posted a team of 100 sailors and officers at the Amur Shipyard in Siberia for training in batches since 2008. The original nuclear submariners of the Indian Navy had all retired by the time the deal for the Nerpa was concluded. The Nerpa itself has been 20 years in the making. The Russians started building it in 1991. But the meltdown of the Soviet Union squeezed funds for the project till India invested in it in exchange for the lease. The contract was signed in 2004.
Government sources keep the nuclear submarine project secret. It is understood that the Nerpa would have a crew of about 70 sailors and officers. Its nuclear propulsion would allow it to stay submerged for up to 100 days without surfacing. But even if this is technically possible, nuclear submarines are usually not under water for that long because such missions are psychologically and physically taxing on the crew.
India’s own nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant, also being built with help from Russian engineers in Visakhapatnam — the navy’s submarine base — is also due for sea trials next year. That means an optimistic assessment of its commissioning would see it joining the fleet only in the second half of 2013.
The Indian Navy’s submarine fleet — its “silent arm” — is fast depleting with the vessels being retired faster than new ones can be added. In the beginning of this year, the navy had 14 submarines — all of them conventional diesel-electric — in sharp contrast to China’s expanding fleet. In 2005, India contracted six French-origin Scorpene submarines. The construction is delayed, ostensibly because of financial and labour issues, and the first of them is expected to join the fleet only in 2015.
By then, four of the existing fleet is expected to be de-commissioned. The cost of the Scorpene project has escalated from the contracted $3.9 billion by more than a billion dollars. The government has begun inquiries with global manufacturers to import an additional six submarines.
-The Telegraph
