Indian Navy scales up deployments, from counter piracy missions to submarine operations

The Indian Navy has scaled up its operations in the past year, spanning anti piracy operations in the Gulf of Guinea to monitoring of extra regional navies and mission based deployments that extended from the West Coast of France to the coasts of New Zealand.

The pace of continuous deployment of ships and submarines is reflected in the number of days Indian Navy assets were at sea in the past year. Sources said that deployments accounted for over 9400 ship days, close to 1150 submarine days and almost 15000 hours of flying in the past year.

Mission based deployments of the Navy have been supported by its P8I Poseidon surveillance aircraft that have extended range and targeting capabliities as well as the MQ 9 drones that are currently on lease from the US.


While maintaining its presence on the Gulf of Aden, which accounts for $ 110 billion worth of trade for India, the Navy has in the past year expanded operations to the Gulf of Guinea, which is emerging as a new hotbed of piracy. This is of particular importance as India is now the second largest trading partner for Africa, in terms of both imports and exports.

Sources said that in the past two years, coordinated efforts with the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) have resulted in substantial cracking down on nefarious elements, adding that drugs worth over Rs 24,000 crore have been seized during operations.

In terms of joint exercise and strengthening interoperability with friendly foreign nations, the Navy has continued engagement in the past year, with 17 multilateral and 20 bilateral exercises being now conducted on an annual basis, sources added.

The Navy has also closely worked with the Indian manned space mission, Project Gaganyaan and has been designated as the lead agency for recovery of the crew module. Maiden trials for recovering the module were successfully conducted in October.