The relatively poor disaster prevention and management infrastructure in most of the countries in the Indian Ocean places a bigger responsibility on the Indian Navy.
Business News : Navy Day this year is a good occasion to reflect on its journey and evaluate its progress over the last 70 years. The Indian Navy was an exceedingly small force at the dawn of independence and, while being a product of both its British inheritance and the maritime DNA of our forebears, is largely a post-independence construct.
Despite the many problems that besieged the newly independent country — and by extension its Navy — such as low industrial base, problems on our land borders made it imperative to focus on the army and the air force. But the navy was not short on vision.
As early as 1948, it drew up ambitious plans for a balanced navy that would consist of light aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, auxiliaries and associated training and maintenance infrastructure.
Seen against this backdrop, the Indian Navy has grown quietly but steadily. From a force of less than half a dozen sloops to one that has 135 ships and 235 aircraft, most of them state-of-the-art, is indeed an impressive story.
That we operate in all three dimensions: On, above and below water; that most of our ships are indigenously built; and that we are among the few navies to build and operate an array of platforms from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines add further strength to the narrative. We are now among the world’s leading navies.
But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Of particular significance is the fact that the navy has built excellent capacities — both human and material — in several disciplines such as hydrography, special operations, integration engineering, doctrine writing, underwater medicine and disaster relief, to name a few.
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