Shipbuilding in India: Challenges and Strategies

Ravi Vohra & T S V Ramana

As a maritime nation, warship-building is an essential element of the India's national security strategy construct. India produces world class warships but still lags behind the world leaders in the production of large commercial vessels. Even so, warshipbuilding processes and practices need to be improved further, so that the industry does not impose increasingly high opportunity costs on scarce national security resources. This volume highlights the challenges that bear upon the shipbuilding industry in India, and the response strategies and mechanisms that need to be resorted to, in order to overcome the challenges. It consists of contributions by renowned experts from across the shipbuilding community, be it the yards or their customers, from India as also from abroad. A brief but succinct overview of the industry in the international context is followed by a detailed examination of the state of the industry in India. The chapters that follow then delve deeper into specific issues like infrastructure constraints in Indian shipyards as also material management issues, capacity limitations and the path to indigenous warship building. The volume also highlights best practices and lessons learned from the design, production and procurement processes of some leading European yards. Efficient shipbuilding is not merely a production issue, particularly for warships wherein stringent government specified acquisition procedures often apply. Not surprisingly, many new developments have taken place worldwide in acquisition processes and procedures as well. The warship acquisition process in the United Kingdom and the US Navy’s ship acquisition procedure have also been dealt with in detail, so that appropriate lessons emerge.

The volume will, thus, be very useful for policy makers, shipbuilding industry personnel both from the technical and non-technical streams, study groups and individual scholars, both from within and outside the shipbuilding community.

Ravi Vohra & T S V Ramana Rear Admiral Ravi Vohra (Retd) is the Director of the National Maritime Foundation.
Commander TSV Ramana is a Research Fellow at the National Maritime Foundation.