With the Navy suffering 12 accidents involving its vessels in the past seven months, the critical issue of delay in refit, maintenance and mid-life upgrade of its warships and submarines has come under scrutiny.
This assumes significance as two submarines namely INS Sindhuratna and Sindhurakshak had undergone upgrades months before they met with mishaps killing 20 personnel.
As modern warships and submarines are complex platforms, their maintenance and refit at regular intervals is a planned exercise so as to prolong operational life. However, mid life upgrades are delayed due to various reasons like lack of spares, funds besides inadequate dry docking facilities.
In fact, the Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG) in its latest report on “Planning and Management of refits of Naval Ships,” pointed out that delay ranged from five to 67 months in mid-life upgrade.
Mid-life upgrades are a special type of refitting exercise and have the potential of enhancing the role worthiness of ships. However, most of the upgrades could not be started in time and their completion was also delayed significantly.
Observing this disturbing trend, CAG said “we observed a delay of five to 67 months in 15 out of 18 ships identified for mid-life upgrade, while ten upgrades were completed with a delay of up to 33 months.”
The report also said the entire package of mid-life upgrade as envisaged while seeking sanction could not be achieved, as many equipment and systems were either deleted or de-linked from upgrade. “Thus, the role enhancement as projected to the competent financial authority, while seeking of the mid-life upgrade package could not be achieved,” the constitutional auditor said.
The main reason for less than optimal refit management continue to be infrastructure constraints at repair yards and timely availability of spares need for completing refit. Availability of required spares continues to be a critical area which needs to be addressed for a fundamental reform of refit management, the CAG report said.
It then went on to observe that lack of full complement of required spares, resort to cannibalization and refurbishment of existing spares when their replacements are unavailable are a matter of concern. Moreover, procurement procedure for spares is not tuned to meet timely requirements of spares for refit.
As regards refit management, the CAG said refits are also marred by considerable delays adding that out of 152 refits test checked by the auditor, only 18 per cent refits commenced as per the norms of the Navy. Also, 74 per cent of the refits were completed with a total delay of 8,629 days.
A ship that is overdue for refit cannot be a part of an optimal solution to India’s security needs and ships undergoing longer repairs are not available for the operational role for which she was commissioned, the report said. Even though these issues were raised by audit in its report in 1999, even after a decade, the same concerns continued to exist, it added.