Indian Navy Chief Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi on Tuesday said indigenous nuclear ballistic submarine INS Aridhaman would be commissioned very soon. He made this statement while addressing the Navy Day press conference in Delhi.
Admiral Tripathi said the Navy was conducting multiple exercises with partner countries.
"Coming to working with our partners... We are very active. We are guided by the PM's vision of 'Mahasagar.' We have conducted 21 bilateral, 9 multilateral, and 34 maritime partnership exercises, 5 corvette deployments, and 13 joint EZT approaches since the last Navy Day,” he said.
Navy chief shares details of major initiatives
The Navy chief also spoke about key initiatives launched by the maritime branch of the Indian Armed Forces.
“I also want to highlight three maiden initiatives in the last year... Indian Ocean Ship Sagar was a maiden initiative by the Navy wherein INS Sunayna IOS SAGAR was flagged off on the 5th of April from Karwar by our defence minister and embarked 44 crews from nine IOR nations' navies and Coast Guard and stayed for over a month, visiting five ports and drew great appreciation from all the participating countries as also whenever she made a port call. All that is there in the open domain,” Admiral Tripathi said.
“The second initiative we did was Africa-India Key Maritime Engagement, which also means unity in Sanskrit. where we partnered with 9 African countries and assembled in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Our defence minister was present there along with the defence minister of Tanzania, and we had great camaraderie and an exchange of best practices among 9 African countries,” he added.
Navy to receive four Rafale fighter jets
Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi announced that the Indian Navy expects to receive its first batch of four Rafale fighter jets by 2029. Besides, he noted that Project 75 India—which involves procuring six state-of-the-art submarines—has progressed significantly and a formal agreement is likely to be finalised soon.
Discussing the Navy’s involvement in Operation Sindoor, Admiral Tripathi stated that the force’s assertive posture and the deployment of key warships effectively deterred Pakistan, keeping their vessels confined to their ports.
“The aggressive posturing and immediate action during Op Sindoor, of deployment of the carrier battle group forced the Pakistan Navy to remain close to their ports or near the Makran coast,” he said.
