View: https://x.com/Parthu_Potluri/status/1882685097331286314
I get the distinct feeling that P-75I will never go through.
It just doesn't make any sense. What is the need to spend Rs. 70,000+ crores ($8+ billion) buying a diesel-electric AIP submarine design when we have all the building blocks for making one ourselves?
The only justification anyone is even attempting to give is that the German offer is 'proven'. But there are huge caveats to that! Germans may have a working fuel cell-based AIP at sea, which meets the technical requirement to qualify for bidding - but this is NOT the AIP that would go on the actual P-75I offer.
The sub they have at hand (Type-214) is too small to meet the IN range/endurance/displacement requirements which is why TKMS is actually planning on offering a new, larger modified variant with design elements taken from the Type-212CD program. Which is more than a third bigger than regular 212/214.
The larger submarine would require an upscaled AIP solution with greater capacity to charge batteries, otherwise it would take a huge performance hit. This new AIP solution has to be built & tested. The new, larger submarine has to undergo the detailed design phase. There aren't any simple off-the-shelf solutions to be had!
There are still so many unknowns in this deal - I simply fail to see how TKMS (a company on verge of bankruptcy, btw) can deliver all this without having to change the amount they bid for (which is the condition for not invoking single-vendor clause and cancelling the whole thing).Even if they can somehow deliver, this is gonna take a lot of time. I don't see us cutting steel before 2030 minimum. By which point our own indigenous fuel cell AIP would be more than ready for retrofit on Kalvari-class, and our first two SSNs would be well into construction!
Justifying a foreign AIP sub purchase, only to induct it at around the same time as when indigenous SSN enters service and indigenous AIP-equipped sub enters service is just bonkers.
The whole P-75I requirement is in need of a DEEP REVIEW. We're simply going with the same requirements as were defined in the 90s (back when nobody was confident of making an AIP at home, and nobody was confident of being able to build nuclear submarines at home). The operating environment has undergone massive change since then - PLAN SSN patrols are a regular occurrence in IOR today.
And domestic industrial capabilities have undergone drastic improvement. We had no SSN program back when the 24-sub SSK plan was devised, the foreign sub + foreign AIP under P-75I was intended to be the high-end of our subsurface force. Today, our plans call for an SSN with a 190MW reactor to be the high-end...Scorpene upgraded with DRDO AIP is sufficient to be the low-end, which can be supplanted in the future by fully indigenous P-76.
The case for P-75I is simply gone in my honest opinion. But unless a holistic review of requirements is done, the Navy & MoD are not in a position to acknowledge the updated requirements & domestic capacities.
www.thehindu.com
