A terrific Thursday for India’s ‘Atmanirbhar’ effort

Buoyed by a mega effort to build sustained self-reliance, two events—commissioning of a stealth submarine and the firing of a cryogenic engine by a private start-up—summed up India’s steady progress in cutting-edge development on a memorable Thursday, writes ETV Bharat’s Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: Upfront, it may have been quite an ordinary day. But for India’s ongoing grand ‘Atmanirbhar’ effort to build self-reliance, it was quite a remarkable one on Thursday.

At the naval dockyard in Mumbai, the INS ‘Vela’—the fourth submarine of the six submarines of the Scorpene class under Project 75—was commissioned into the Indian Navy, while in Nagpur, a Hyderabad-headquartered private start-up ‘Skyroot Aerospace’ successfully test-fired the country’s first India’s first private cryogenic engine.

INS Vela

The commissioning of the INS ‘Vela’ is full of implications at a time when China’s navy is intent on enhancing its presence in the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean besides increasing its naval strength with remarkable speed.

And with India-China relations passing a very turbulent phase, the submarine’s advanced stealth features endow a huge force multiplier capability to the ‘Vela’ allowing it to lurk undetected for long periods of time.

But what makes the INS ‘Vela’ more outstanding is the fact that numerous Indian companies collaborated with the state-owned Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL) and M/s Naval Group of France to bring the submarine to the seas—thereby making it a good representative of the ‘Atmanirbhar’ effort.

Says a release: “Vela has taken the ‘Make in India' spirit a notch higher with the fitment indigenised battery cells, which power a very silent permanently magnetised propulsion motor. The construction of the submarine under the supervision of in-house design overseeing team of MDL, naval engineers from Submarine Design Group (SDG), Submarine Overseeing Team (SOT) and training crew by Indian Training Team (ITT) is a major milestone towards ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’.”

A proud Admiral Karambir Singh, Chief of the Naval Staff, said during his address at the commissioning ceremony: “The platform in front of us today showcases India’s notable strides in indigenous submarine construction, as also the journey from being a ‘Buyer’s Navy to a Builder’s Navy’.”

Indicating further intensification of India’s relentless quest for indigenization, Admiral Singh said: “While the Project 75 has been an important step in enhancing the Navy’s capability, we are simultaneously progressing Project 75-I, under the Strategic Partnership Model, which envisions achieving complete self-reliance in submarine construction and life cycle sustenance. The Project 75-I aims to develop all facets of the submarine construction ecosystem within the nation and also involves transfer of several niche technologies.”

Cryogenic Engine

India’s affair with the development of a cryogenic rocket engine for firing satellites and its use in space-based operations is a tale of big disappointments and abject failures, having been let down by Russia and then by the US, followed by several failures of domestic and indigenous efforts.

The announcement on Thursday of the successful test-firing of a cryogenic rocket engine by Skyroot Aerospace at the Solar Industries India Ltd testing facility in Nagpur is akin to a development of game-changing proportions for India’s private sector.

Cryogenic engines are super efficient systems that use propellants at cryogenic temperatures (less than minus 150° Celsius), allowing for very significant enhancement of payloads—which can translate into many more satellites or more fuel.

Skyroot’s cryogenic rocket engine has been developed by using 3D printing with a superalloy, cutting down manufacturing time by more than 95 percent in the process.

The engine runs on Liquid Natural gas (LNG) and Liquid Oxygen (LoX) at cryogenic temperatures as propellants. While LNG is considered to be the rocket fuel of the future, both these propellants are high performance, low-cost, and green.

With the Space Activities Bill 2017 poised to be cleared by Parliament soon and in the backdrop of the space sector reforms announced by the government in June 2020, the development is deeply significant as it will open up the space sector to the private sector under authorisation and supervision by the government.

In July 2021, Union Minister of State for Space Jitendra Singh had said in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha that the government is in the process of creating an ecosystem to encourage more private participation in the indigenous production of space technologies, services and devices.

Read:INS Vela commissioned into Indian Navy