14.7.14

Another Warship mishap!

In yet another warship mishap, missile corvette INS Kuthar was damaged after it recently ran aground in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Indian Navy has ordered a board of inquiry (BoI) into the accident, which is the 15th such incident after submarine INS Sindhurakshak sank at Mumbai naval dockyard on August 14 last year.
The 1,350-tonne INS Kuthar, which was commissioned in 1990, was entering the harbour to dock at one of the two jetties at Port Blair when it ran aground in the “rough weather“ towards June-end.
“The propeller of the corvette was damaged... it will undergo repairs at Vizag,“ said an officer.
Though INS Kuthar is part of the Eastern Naval Command, the Khukri-class corvette was on a long-range patrol in the Bay of Bengal. The board of inquiry into the mishap will be headed by a Captain from the A&N tri-Service Command.
It was this string of accidents, especially the two serious ones on board submarines INS Sindhurakshak and INS Sindhuratna that killed five officers and 15 sailors, which led Admiral D K Joshi to “own moral responsibility“ and resign as Navy chief on February 26.
The then UPA government appointed Admiral Robin Dhowan as the chief after a gap of 50 days, superseding the Western Naval Command chief Vice-Admiral Shekhar Sinha, who then put in his papers.
The politico-bureaucratic combine itself, however, cannot escape responsibility for ignoring the Navy's repeated warnings about its ageing submarines, all of them over 20 years old.

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