New Delhi (Sputnik) — After a delay of more than five years, the Indian Navy is set to receive its third anti-submarine corvette INS Kiltan. The warship will be commissioned on October 16 under the Eastern Naval Command, Vishakhapatnam. This is the third Corvette of Project 28 under which commercial company Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers had constructed and delivered two corvettes – INS Kamorta in July 2014 and INS Kadmatt in November 2015 to the Indian Navy.
INS Kiltan would be able to sail at a speed of over 24 knots in comparison to 23.9 knots on the first and 22.8 knots on the second Corvette. The ASW corvette would carry torpedoes, two rocket launchers, hello borne torpedoes and depth launchers. The Corvette was designed to incorporate stealth features to minimize underwater noise, radar cross-section, and infra-red emissions.
The Indian Navy had envisaged inclusion of indigenous weapons and sensors including hull-mounted sonar, active towed array sonar, advanced torpedo defense system, underwater telephone, bathy thermograph and ASW fire control system into the ASW corvettes.
It is yet not clear whether the third Corvette will have all the critical 18 weapons and sensors which were supposed to be fitted in the ships. The earlier two corvettes lacked capabilities to detect, locate, track and classify all types of sub-surface targets like torpedoes, mines, and submarines. The corvettes also do not have protection from torpedo attack as it is not fitted with a launcher employed to decoy the torpedo away from the ship. As the state-owned Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Bharat Dynamics Limited could not develop missile protection system in time, the Corvettes do not have double layered defense along with the augmented capability to defend against salvo attack.
