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Vice-Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral P Murugesan on Friday said that Indian Navy, in its endeavour to undergo a paradigm shift from buyers’ Navy to builders’ Navy, is aiming at achieving 90 per cent self-reliance in manufacturing capabilities across all three areas of the services – float, move and fight.
“We have come a long way in move and fight. In the float category, we are able to meet the demands of the war shipbuilding industry almost to 90 per cent domestically … The next one is move where we are able to meet 50 per cent. But, in the fight component, we are far behind; there, almost 25-30 per cent of the requirement is met domestically. But, our aspiration, with the cooperation of the industry, is that we all must do all the three components to 90 per cent,” he said while addressing FICCI.
He was addressing the industry on the international seminar on ‘Make in India’ Paradigm Roadmap for a Future Ready Naval Force, which will be held on April 18-19. Murugesan said although there is no target to achieve this 90 per cent indigenisation, almost 18-46 per cent of the new shipbuilding contracts are being outsourced to Indian shipyards.
Presently, there are 46 ships under different stages of construction in the Indian shipyards right from aircraft carrier, submarines, destroyers, frigates. All of them are under construction in our yards, he added.
The Vice-Chief of Naval Staff also expressed concern over inadequate Budget allocation for the Navy out of the total Defence budget. “Budget can never be sufficient. We are waiting for final details how it (budgetary allocation) is going to be distributed among the three services and within each service, how much is going to be capital, how much revenue, all those details will come in time. I can never say it is sufficient. We need more budget,” he added.
In fiscal 2015-16, Indian Navy’s budget allocation stood at 15.3 per cent of the total Defence Budget.
“The Navy received a small share of the Defence budget because the priorities were elsewhere. Because of that, the Navy has been compelled to think differently. The difference has been self-reliance through indigenisation…We have moved from a buyers’ Navy to a builders’ Navy,” he said.
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