INS Vikrant, India's First Home-Designed and Home-Built Aircraft Carrier, Entered Service on 2 September 2022 With 76 Percent Indigenous Content and the Name of the 1971 War Carrier

On 2 September 2022 the Prime Minister commissioned INS Vikrant at Cochin Shipyard in Kochi, the first aircraft carrier India designed and built itself, according to the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press agency. She is 262.5 metres long, can operate 30 aircraft, and the Navy puts her indigenous content at 76 percent.

The Navy’s in-house design organisation drew up the ship, and Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL), a public-sector yard under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, built her. Largest ship ever built in India, PIB calls her. The name comes from an older carrier, bought in 1957, whose aircraft attacked East Pakistan’s harbours in 1971.

A carrier in numbers

Dimensions in PIB’s commissioning release are 262.5 metres by 61.6 metres, with a top designed speed of 28 knots (about 52 kilometres an hour) and an endurance of 7,500 nautical miles. Four gas turbines total 88 megawatts, says the delivery release. According to the commissioning release the ship makes enough electricity for roughly 5,000 households.

Around 1,600 people crew her, women officers and sailors among them, in about 2,200 compartments by PIB’s count and over 2,300 by CSL’s. CSL’s release adds about 2,300 kilometres of cabling and 120 kilometres of piping.

Aircraft leave the deck over a ski-jump, a ramp at the bow, and land by catching arrester wires. STOBAR, short take-off but arrested recovery, is the Navy’s name for the method. An air wing of 30 aircraft, PIB lists: MiG-29K fighters, Kamov-31 and MH-60R helicopters, plus indigenously built Advanced Light Helicopters and the naval version of the Light Combat Aircraft. A 2025 PIB backgrounder adds the MiG-29KUB trainer and the Chetak helicopter.

On her weight the official releases do not agree. At commissioning PIB said about 43,000 tonnes. Its delivery release of 28 July 2022 says a full displacement close to 45,000 tonnes, CSL’s release says about 45,000 tonnes deep displacement, and the 2025 backgrounder repeats 45,000. On the eve of the 2013 launch the defence commentator Ajai Shukla quoted 37,500 tonnes. Naval Encyclopedia gives the older Vikrant 19,500 tonnes fully loaded, which makes the new ship more than twice her size on any of these figures.

From keel to commissioning

PIB says the keel, the backbone laid first on the building slip, went down at CSL in February 2009. The ship was launched on 12 August 2013, per CSL. Maiden sea trials began on 4 August 2021, and user acceptance trials ran from August 2021 to July 2022. On 28 July 2022 CSL handed her to the Navy, and the commissioning followed five weeks later.

Cost came to close to ₹20,000 crore (₹200 billion), PIB’s delivery release says, and the work ran in three contract phases between the Defence Ministry and CSL, signed in May 2007, December 2014 and October 2019. Engineers at CSL modelled the whole carrier in 3D and drew the production drawings from the model, the first time a ship that size had been done that way in India, the yard says.

At the commissioning ceremony the Prime Minister also unveiled a new naval ensign, the flag the Navy flies, and dedicated it to Chhatrapati Shivaji. At the same event the Defence Minister said that the Navy’s tradition is “old ships never die”, and tied the new carrier to the one that served in 1971.

Steel India had to learn to make

In CSL’s description the vessel is a steel structure of 21,500 tonnes of special-grade steel developed in India and used in Indian naval ships for the first time. For its part the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) says it supplied about 30,000 tonnes of specialty steel, from its plants at Bhilai, Bokaro and Rourkela except for the bulb bars, the shaped strips that stiffen plate. SAIL developed the plates with the Navy and the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory. PIB’s 2025 backgrounder repeats the 30,000 figure, while Shukla wrote 26,000 tonnes in 2013. The sources do not explain the gap.

Plate grades carry the names DMR 249A, used for the hull, and 249B for the flight deck, which has to take repeated landings by aircraft of 20 to 30 tonnes, Shukla wrote. He reported that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) started its warship steel project in 1999, that Russia supplied the chemical formula, and that the hard part was making the steel in quantity. Bhilai’s continuous-casting process brought the price down, he wrote.

PIB’s delivery release concludes that the partnership among the Navy, DRDO and SAIL has made India self-sufficient in warship steel, and that every warship now built in the country uses it. Our list of the nine ships commissioned between February and October 2026 gives the builders and dates for recent ones.

About 550 vendors and 14,500 jobs

About 550 Indian vendors supported construction, CSL says, close to 100 of them micro, small and medium enterprises. PIB’s commissioning release puts it at over 550 equipment makers, sub-contractors and ancillary firms and over 100 such enterprises. Direct jobs at CSL come to about 2,000 and indirect ones to about 12,500, which makes 14,500.

PIB’s delivery release names BEL, BHEL, GRSE, Keltron, Kirloskar, Larsen & Toubro and Wartsila India among the industrial houses that supplied equipment. The project raised CSL’s own detailed design and engineering skills, the yard says, and gave the Navy’s design team experience in the basic and functional design of a carrier. Indian yards had built warships for the Royal Navy in the early 1800s, a story told in our article on the Bombay Dockyard, and our piece on India’s defence industry sets Vikrant beside the Tejas fighter and the BrahMos missile.

The name: a carrier bought unfinished in 1957

PIB’s delivery release says the new ship is named after her predecessor, India’s first aircraft carrier. That ship began as HMS Hercules, a Royal Navy light carrier laid down at Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne in 1943 and launched in September 1945. Work stopped in May 1946 with the hull about 75 percent complete, according to Naval Encyclopedia.

India bought the hull in 1957. Harland & Wolff in Belfast finished her with an angled deck, steam catapults and a modified island, the superstructure on the flight deck. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, India’s High Commissioner in London, commissioned her as INS Vikrant at Belfast on 4 March 1961, writes Sushmito Lahiry in Live History India. At Bombay on 3 November 1961 she joined the fleet, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru received her at Ballard Pier.

Her first air group, per Naval Encyclopedia, was ten Hawker Sea Hawk fighters, four Breguet Alizé anti-submarine aircraft and two Alouette II helicopters. Among her service, PIB’s backgrounder lists the 1961 Goa operation. Our account of the Goa campaign records the carrier as part of the Navy’s task force.

December 1971 in the Bay of Bengal

Rear Admiral Santosh Kumar Gupta (retired), who commanded the Sea Hawk squadron and won the Maha Vir Chakra, says in an account published by the Tribune that the carrier was in poor repair in 1971: one of her four boilers needed replacing, which held her to 14 knots. In late July the squadron moved to Madras with six aircraft, and by mid-October 18 Sea Hawks were aboard.

Vikrant sailed on the night of 3 December, when the war began. Gupta writes that the Sea Hawks were the day strike force and the Alizés flew reconnaissance. Their targets included Cox’s Bazar, where two gunboats and river craft were sunk, Chittagong harbour, and the river ports of Khulna, Chalna and Mongla. Strike forces ranged from four to ten Sea Hawks. About 300 strike sorties were flown in 10 days, and eight Sea Hawks and a similar number of Alizés were hit by ground fire, he says. Our telling of the 13-day war puts those strikes in the wider campaign.

Lahiry counts two Maha Vir Chakras and 12 Vir Chakras for the ship’s company, and Naval Encyclopedia gives the same figures. The strike details here come from an Indian participant, and none of the sources used gives Pakistan’s own record of them.

Decommissioning came on 31 January 1997, after 36 years of service according to PIB’s commissioning release. She was kept as a museum ship in Mumbai, and India TV reports that the Maharashtra government had said it could not run her as a museum because the cost was not viable. The same report says the ship-breaker IB Commercial won the bid to scrap her for ₹60 crore (₹600 million), and quotes its Abdul Zaka saying breaking began the day before the 21 November 2014 report. More than 60 percent of her artefacts went to the Maritime History Society in Mumbai and the rest to the Naval Aviation Museum in Goa.

What the new carrier has done since 2022

In its backgrounder PIB lists the first landings of the naval LCA and the MiG-29K in February 2023 and night landings in May 2023. Final operational clearance ran from January to November 2024, it says, with more than 750 hours of flying. Vikrant took part in the multinational exercise MILAN 24 in February 2024, which PIB says drew over 36 ships and senior officers from 47 countries, and in Exercise Varuna 25 with the French carrier group Charles de Gaulle in March 2025.

In March 2025 a Sea King helicopter from the ship winched three injured crew off the Panama-flagged bulk carrier MV Heilan Star, 230 nautical miles west of Goa, and flew them to INS Hansa. The backgrounder also says the Vikrant carrier group deployed in the northern Arabian Sea during Operation Sindoor, which is the Indian government’s account of that deployment. From 19 to 20 October 2025 the Prime Minister spent an overnight sea sortie aboard.

What took the extra years

Her first contract phase dates from May 2007, and delivery came in July 2022. In a Lok Sabha reply reported by DNA India on 6 December 2015, the Minister of State for Defence gave a target delivery of December 2018 and a revised project cost of ₹19,341 crore. He cited a shortage of warship-grade steel, late ordering of the propulsion integration work and delays in Russian approvals for design and equipment. Among the challenges of the later years, PIB’s delivery release names the COVID-19 pandemic and a changed geopolitical situation.

CSL’s release says the yard was building a new dry dock to take larger ships, including a next-generation aircraft carrier.