India Commissions Its First Major Warship Built By A Private Shipyard

India commissioned the first of class Multi-Purpose Vessels (MPVs) built by a private company for the first time. This is being seen as a shift in a naval shipbuilding programme that had run for decades almost entirely through state-owned yards

Image Source: @VPIndia on X

INS Samarthak entered service at the navy’s base at Karwar on the Arabian Sea coast at a ceremony presided over by Vice-President C P Radhakrishnan and attended by the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Krishna Swaminathan, Karnataka’s labour minister Santosh Lad, and executives of Larsen and Toubro, the engineering group that built her.

Swaminathan described the ship as the first major warship contracted to and constructed by a private shipyard. Indian private firms have supplied the navy with components, smaller craft and dock infrastructure for years, but the warships themselves have come from government-owned yards.

The admiral was measured about what follows. Shortening the journey from prototype to production, he said, is critical to maintaining the operational edge at sea, and even a very successful maiden achievement can give useful pointers for improving quality and cutting timelines.

Samarthak is not a combatant. She was conceived as a platform for trials and evaluation, and her principal value to the navy is as a place to test weapons and sensors being developed by Indian industry without taking a fighting ship off the line. She can launch and recover targets used in exercises, and operate as a mothership for unmanned and autonomous systems, a role navies worldwide are now building hulls to perform.

Her other tasks are closer to the work of a utility vessel. The navy lists maritime surveillance and reconnaissance, offshore patrol, heavy towing, firefighting, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and the evacuation of non-combatants. She carries medical facilities and a dynamic positioning system that allows her to hold station precisely.

She was designed in-house at Larsen and Toubro’s warship design centre in Chennai and built at the company’s Kattupalli yard in Tamil Nadu, using modular construction and pre-outfitting to compress the build. The contract for the class was signed in 2022 and reported at 8.87 billion rupees, about 93 million dollars. Samarthak was launched in October 2024 and delivered to the navy at the end of August.