Admiral Gorshkov

India may have to shell out as much as $2 billion more to Russia to get aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov by end-2012. This will be over and above the original $1.5 billion package deal signed in January 2004, under which India was to get a fully-refurbished Gorshkov with 16 MiG-29K fighters.The defence ministry, after a lot of groundwork, now hopes to begin the “formal renegotiation’’ of the entire 2004 contract with Russia in August after a nod by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS).After a flurry of top-level discussions and visits to the Sevmash shipyard in north Russia, where the decommissioned carrier has been berthed for the last 12 years, India acknowledges it will have to pay “substantially more’’ for the 44,570-tonne warship. As per the 2004 contract, the refurbished Gorshkov, rechristened INS Vikramaditya after India paid an initial $500 million, was to be delivered by August 2008. But once the partly-burnt huge warship was “opened up’’ at Sevmash, Russia found it had “grossly underestimated’’ the work needed to make it fighting fit again. The estimate for the ship’s new cabling, for instance, jumped up to 2,400 km from the original 700 km.Then, of course, the work entails removal of the huge missile launchers on the bow to build a ski-jump at a 14.3 degree angle for MiG-29Ks, apart from new-generation communication, air defence and other weapons, including new missile systems.
Holding that a lot of equipment on the carrier like cables, steel, motors, turbines, boilers and the like needed to be replaced, Russia stunned India by asking for $1.2 billion more last year. After protests about cost escalation in a “fixed price contract’’, India finally accepted the Russian view that “many errors’’ were made in the original estimate in the absence of blueprints since the carrier was built in Ukraine in the 1980s.