Sinking Indian Waters....

Recent accidents in Indian waters involving the submerging of INS Sindhurakshak, leading to death of around 18 crew members and other incidents propelled the ongoing resentment against the country’s government and evoked the feeling that our navy is not as developed as it should be to fight the challenging superpowers of the nation and to tackle the ongoing geographical pressures being exerted by countries like Pakistan and China.

But why is so that we are experiencing such a plethora of problems here in our Navy which is one of the most crucial parts of the whole Indian military services?

 So let’s again turn about to dug out the reason behind so many debacles.

Indian Navy is one of the strongest military forces of the nation. It has around 58,350 personnel. In the Defence Budget 2013-14, Indian Navy had a share of around 18%. All these figures are absolutely propitious. Government of India had allocated 1,93,407.29 crores to Indian Military forces in the session 2012-2013, but in 2013-14  the government incremented the budget to allocated around 2,03,672.12 crores which is a good stimulant for the growth of the defence sector.

But the main problem that the whole navy or you can say all the Indian Military forces face is that they don't acquire technology and if they have, they just don’t know all the aspects of the available technology.

Indian Navy presently has around 250 aircrafts and 179 ships in its account but what’s disgusting is that most of them have been bought from either United Kingdom or Russia. Till now India has hardly ever made any progress in developing its own aircrafts or ships. Still now erecting own warships continue to be a distant dream.

Inability to develop its own warships or aircrafts acts the main impediment in the way of progress that Indian Navy needs to make in order to prove itself in the competition. The Indian government now needs to take some stiff steps in order to ensure that development takes place in the Indian defence sector and that indispensable institutions like Indian Navy don’t lag behind.

The first step that Indian Government needs to take is to privatize the harbours. These days due to no competition and zero maintenance, Indian harbours are being in toto neglected by the authorities. If government privatizes the harbours and permit entrepreneurship, so as to induce healthy competition which would lead to good maintenance of the Navy harbours and would definitely ameliorate the condition of Indian Navy.  

Contemporarily Indian navy is having no innovative technology. The condition is so much worse that even for repairing or refurbishment the aircraft or ships have to be sent to nations like UK, US and Russia.

Now the time has come when the Indian Navy invests in international defence equipment companies excessively. Today in nations like Russia and United States, thousands of innovative companies are there which are struggling for funds. If Indian navy pioneers funding them then, there would be a huge inflow of technology in the whole nation and this would also act as an incentive for other forces. If the government and navy invest in foreign companies, then Indian companies would also endeavor to invent new technologies and this would lead to humongous benefit of the whole navy as well as other military services.

The other thing that the government needs to do is to establish an institution in India with an aim to devise the country’s own aircrafts and ships. It can be done with the assistance of foreign experts. Today equipment from countries like Russia, USA and UK are not up to the mark. In order to set up such institution India can take help from defence analysts from countries like Russia who were unemployed after the disintegration of USSR, just like America which took help of around 500 German scientists in order to establish the NASA.

The government should also set up an institution which should be there in order to repair the unused aircrafts or ships. We can learn this from Russia. Russia refurbished the whole of Admiral Gorshkov (now INS Vikramaditya) which it had decommissioned back in the year 1996. India needs to learn that too. Today the condition of Indian Navy has plunged to such a low level that as I mentioned earlier, India has to send its out of order ships or aircrafts to other countries for repairing. For instance- INS Viraat had to be sent to UK for refurbishment.

If we set up institutions here, then such problems and delay in refurbishment could definitely be snubbed off.

If the Indian government follows the above mentioned ways and forsake its dilatory attitude then it can definitely revive the Indian military forces.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI