World-class warships at Indian prices

Kailash Colony market, a middle-class shopping area in south Delhi, is an unlikely headquarters for one of the world’s most successful warship design programmes.

A single armed sentry post and a strand of barbed wire atop the boundary walls are all that hint at an ultra high-security installation — the Directorate General of Naval Design (DGND) — that has fathered battleships like the INS Mumbai, which turned heads across the globe when it sailed into war-torn Beirut in 2006 to evacuate hundreds of Indians stranded by Israel’s attack on Lebanon.

Rear Admiral MK Badhwar, the navy’s design chief, explains how the navy got so far ahead of the army and air force in indigenising its weaponry. Shaken by the 1962 defeat at the hands of China, the army and the air force gratefully bought military equipment from whoever was willing to sell.

Read more