New Delhi/MOSCOW: Russia admitted yesterday it would not be able to deliver to India by the year-end a refurbished but still-faulty Soviet-era aircraft carrier that has come to symbolise its recent military decline.
The December handover date for the 30-year-old Admiral Gorshkov - renamed the INS Vikramaditya by India since the agreement to purchase the carrier in 2004 - is set to be pushed back by nine months, a top shipping official said.
“We expect to push back the aircraft carrier’s handover by nine months,” news agencies quoted Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (OSK) Andrei Dyachkov as saying.
Reports have said that problems had developed on three of the eight boilers during testing. An explosion of one had put the ship out of commission in the 1990s before India considered the craft. Dyachkov said that other equipment had also failed during a test-run for the client - including items provided by Nato nations for their Asian military ally.
The broken pieces included “three coolers, a nitrogen gas generator, and a range of other equipment,” OSK head Dyachkov reported to Deputy Prime Minister and the government’s military hardware pointman Dmitry Rogozin.
Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said separately that a delay was now “likely” and lamented about the damage done to Russia’s once-proud military reputation. “The fact that our quality is suffering - this really is a problem,” Serdyukov was quoted as saying.India and China remain Russia’s two biggest arms clients despite efforts by both countries to break ties with a partner that has proven increasingly unreliable in recent years.
Russia supplies India with much of its air force but has been dragged into ugly spats over spare parts costs required to fix the rapid wear and tear of the machines. The 19,000-tonne conventionally-powered Gorshkov was launched in 1982 and entered military service six years later.
It was hit both by a fire and a separate boiler room explosion in February 1994 that killed six seamen and immediately put the ship out of commission.
India - its tensions with rival Pakistan peaking at the time and both countries assuming a series of nuclear tests -- entered negotiations with Russia on the Gorshkov’s purchase later that same year.
The two sides have since fought bitterly over upgrade costs and delays caused by New Delhi’s unhappiness with the state of the ship’s weapons and basic equipment.
Meanwhile, India yesterday inducted a brand new catamaran-based hydrography survey ship, the first of its kind in its navy.
The indigenously-built ship was formally commissioned in to the Indian Navy by Western Naval Command Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha at the Karwar naval base on Karnataka’s coast on the Arabian Sea.
Christened INS Makar, the warship was built at the Gujarat-based Alcock Ashdown shipyard and is a statement of the Indian warship building industry’s potential.AFP/IANS
