The Hindustan Shipyard Ltd is building two Diving Support Vessels (DSVs) for the Indian Navy. These DSVs will help with submarine support operations and will be launched on Thursday in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
Admiral R Hari Kumar, who is the head of the Navy, will be the most important person at the ceremony. The ships will be launched by Kala Hari Kumar, president of the Navy Welfare and Wellness Association (NWWA). He will also give them their traditional names, officials said Wednesday.
There are four important ceremonies in a ship’s life: laying the keel, launching, putting the ship into service, and taking it out of service. When a ship is moved from the place where it was built into the water, this is called its launch.
Officials said that these DSVs are the first ships of their kind to be made for the Indian Navy at the HSL. The ships are 118.4 metres long, 22.8 metres wide at their widest point, and can carry 9,350 tonnes.
In this case, a contract was signed between the Indian Navy and HSL in September 2018.
Officials said that in addition to using submarines to keep the water safe, the Indian Navy also does diving operations in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to help with things like submarine rescue, underwater inspection, testing, or salvage and recovery of objects, ships, or planes lost at sea. As these activities involve diving operations in which divers stay underwater for long periods of time, they need platforms that can be used to launch and recover divers and carry the tools and equipment they need.
The DSVs also have a Deep Submergence Rescue Vessel (DSRV), which makes it much easier for them to save people trapped in submarines.
The Indian Navy says that these ships will be able to patrol for a long time, do search and rescue work, and fly helicopters on the high seas.
“The DSV project has created a lot of local jobs and encouraged indigenization, which will help India’s economy,” the Navy said.
Officials said that a submarine is an important strategic asset, but it is also vulnerable to damage from action and requires a lot of diving to do search and rescue missions, which need a reliable and well-equipped platform. The key to improving the Indian Navy’s submarine rescue operations in the IOR would be to add DSVs that are equipped with DSRV.
