India-made Mahendragiri warship to be launched in Mumbai tomorrow

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 30

Mahendragiri, the last of the seven warships of the Nilgiri-class stealth frigates, will be launched on September 1.

Commissioning between 2025 & 2027

• So far, six Nilgiri-class warships have been launched
• Nilgiri and Himgiri were launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively
• The launch of Udaygiri, Dunagiri, Taragiri and Vindhyagiri began in May 2022
• All Nilgiri-class ships are scheduled to be commissioned between 2025 and 2027

Dr Sudesh Dhankhar, wife of Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, will do the honours at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL), Mumbai. So far, six Nilgiri-class warships have been launched. Nilgiri and Himgiri were launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

Udaygiri, Dunagiri, Taragiri and Vindhyagiri have been launched since May 2022. The launch of the seventh and last ship — Mahendragiri — will mean five launches of the same class warships in about 15 months. All Nilgiri-class ships are scheduled to be commissioned between 2025 and 2027.

Frigate features

Displacement: 6,670 tonne

Length: 149 metres

Width: 17.8 metres

Draft: 5.22 metres

Speed: 28 knots

Range: 10,200 kms

Crew: 226 sailors

Engines: 2 General Electric LM2500

The speed of manufacturing warships has improved ever since the new method of “integrated construction” has been adopted. Mahendragiri is named after a mountain peak in Eastern Ghats located in Odisha.

Three Nilgiri-class warships are a follow-up of Shivalik-class frigates but with vastly improved stealth features, advanced weapons and sensors and platform management systems.

The Nilgiri warships are built with new radar-absorbing coatings, composite materials and shape superstructures that avoid radar detection. Mahendragiri will have a 76mm main gun, two 30 mm AK-630M anti-aircraft artillery systems, two torpedo tubes, launchers for eight BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles and 32 Barak-8 surface to air missiles. Its main radar will be MF-STAR.

The Nilgiri-class warships have been designed in-house by Indian Navy’s Warship Design Bureau, the pioneer organisation for all warship design activities. A substantial 75 per cent of the orders for equipment and systems of the Nilgiri class have been made to indigenous firms, including micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Four of Nilgiri-class warships are under construction at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited, Mumbai, and three at Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Limited, Kolkata. Both shipbuilders are public sector enterprises under the Ministry of Defence.

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