India and US in sub rescue drill

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Rajat Pandit TNN

New Delhi: If an Indian submarine gets “disabled’’ deep underwater, the sailors are sunk since the country has only rudimentary submarine rescue facilities. Now, in a unique and complex endeavour, Indian and US navies are coming together to practise the rescue of “trapped” submariners from deep underwater.
The Indo-American submarine rescue exercise will kick off later this month, with the US Navy slated to fly down a submarine rescue system – a deep-submergence rescue vessel (DSRV) or a submarine rescue chamber (SRC) – to Mumbai, sources said.
The DSRV or SRC will then be shipped to the exercise area, where it will dive deep underwater to “mate’’ with the “disabled” submarine to rescue sailors in an intricate manoeuvre rarely practised by Indian sailors.
A DSRV or “mini submarine”, equipped with pressurised chambers, sonars and cameras, can rescue 24 sailors at a time from a depth of up to 610 metres after “mating” with a stricken vessel’s hatch.
At present, Indian sailors bank upon “submarine escape pressurized suits”’, or the help of diving support ships like INS Nireekshak, but they can be used only for relatively shallow depths.
The Navy’s endeavour to procure two DSRVs of its own, for about Rs 1,000 crore, has been hanging fire for well over a decade now. As an “interim measure”, India had inked a contract with the US Navy in 1997 for its “global submarine rescue fly-away kit’’ service, paying an initial $734,443 for it. But the agreement got derailed due to the sanctions imposed after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests. It was later revived in 2004 but there was huge delay in setting up the requisite infrastructure needed for submarine rescue operations.