The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) on Tuesday inducted the Samudra Pratap, its first Pollution Control Vessel (PCV) that is 75 per cent indigenously designed.
Delivered by Goa Shipyard Limited (GSL) to the ICG on Tuesday, the Samudra Pratap is the first in a series of two PCVs (02 PCV Project) that the shipmaker developed to help the ICG combat oil spills at sea.
Measuring 114.5m in length and 16.5 m in breadth, with a displacement of 4,170 tonnes, this is the largest vessel in the ICG's fleet, the defence ministry said on Wednesday.
This PCV is also the first ICG vessel to be equipped with Dynamic Positioning capability (DP-1), in addition to a FiFi-2/FFV-2 notation certificate.
"These advanced features significantly enhance India’s marine pollution response and operational precision," GSL said in a post on X.
The Samudra Pratap also contains advanced systems to detect oil spills, such as an oil finger printing machine, a gyro-stabilised Standoff Active Chemical Detector, and pollution control lab equipment.
This will aid high-precision operations at sea that involve recovering pollutants from viscous oil, analysing contaminants, or separating oil from contaminated waters.
The GSL has also fitted the Samudra Pratap with a 30mm Closed Range Naval-91 (CRN-91) gun, and two 12.7mm stabilised remote-controlled guns with integrated fire control systems.
These features are in addition to the PCV's indigenously developed Integrated Bridge System, Integrated Platform Management System, Automated Power Management System, and a high-capacity external firefighting system.
This comes after two high-profile naval pollution accidents in Indian waters earlier this year that had caused major ecological problems.
In June this year, the Singapore-flagged container ship MV Wan Hai (IMO: 9294862) had caught fire just 44 nautical miles (NM) away off Kerala's coast. It contained around 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil, 240 tonnes of diesel, and about 32 tonnes of nitrocellulose (stored in alcohol).
Firefighting operations had to carefully put out the flames while also pulling it away from the coast using tug vessels.
A month before that, the Liberian-flagged container ship MSC Elsa 3 (IMO: 9123221) sank after it severely listed (tilted to one side due to the entry of water inside the vessel) just 14.6 NM off the coast of Kerala's Alappuzha district.
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It had been carrying 643 containers, some of which had hazardous materials, such as 367.1 tonnes of furnace oil and 84.44 tonnes of diesel, which were removed from the vessel (now officially a shipwreck) in October this year.