New Delhi: The Indian Navy wants Hindustan Shipyard Limited (HSL) to grow into a strategic partner rather than remain a construction-only yard, the deputy chief of the naval staff (DCNS), Vice Admiral Tarun Sobti, said during a visit to the Visakhapatnam-based defence public sector shipbuilder on Monday. VAdm Sobti’s stop at HSL formed part of a wider three-day review of Eastern Naval Command.
During his review, the DCNS also interacted with crews aboard INS Agray, INS Dunagiri and INS Mysore and assessed the command’s operational readiness and modernization projects.
At HSL, the chairman and managing director, Rear Admiral Chandrasekharan Raghuram (Retd), briefed VAdm Sobti on the shipyard’s recent projects, infrastructure upgrades and expanding capabilities. The briefing came just four days after Raghuram, a former assistant chief of materiel with more than three decades in naval engineering, took charge of the yard on July 2 – making the visit an early test of how the new leadership intends to run one of India’s most strategically sensitive defence enterprises.
VAdm Sobti said HSL had been a reliable partner of the Navy for decades and would be central to the country’s expanding maritime sector. He added that the Navy wanted the relationship to move beyond ship construction to cover full life-cycle support, including upgrades and mid-life refits. “Quality and timely delivery is very, very important,” he said, while also stressing continued investment in design capability and workforce experience. “The most critical aspect is the experience of the people,” he noted, adding that HSL had built up meaningful expertise over the years and was well placed to expand further as a strategic partner of the Navy.
A yard in transition
The visit lands at a crucial moment for HSL. Founded in 1941 and brought under government ownership in 1952, it is India’s oldest and, after Cochin Shipyard, second-largest shipyard, with a covered building dock rated for vessels of up to 80,000 deadweight tonnage. It holds Mini Ratna Category-I status under the Ministry of Defence’s Department of Defence Production, giving its board greater autonomy on capital spending, joint ventures and technology tie-ups without seeking case-by-case government clearance.
Submarine work remains its most strategically significant line of business. HSL has carried out extended medium refits of Kilo-class submarines including INS Sindhukirti, INS Vela and INS Vagli, with Sindhukirti’s refit currently underway, and earlier retrofitted INS Sindhuvir before its transfer to Myanmar. The yard is now preparing to move from refit work into submarine construction in partnership with Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, part of a broader push to deepen India’s domestic submarine industrial base.
Beyond submarines, HSL builds diving support vessels with high indigenous content and delivered INS Dhruv, India’s first indigenously built ocean surveillance ship. Its order book also includes a Navy fleet support ship contract worth close to ₹19,000 crore, among the largest domestic shipbuilding deals on record, and it is upgrading its heavy-lift capacity with a slipway extension and a 300-tonne Goliath crane. Separately, HSL has been in talks with the Andhra Pradesh government over land for a proposed greenfield facility to build large commercial tankers and gas carriers, signalling ambitions that extend well beyond naval contracts.
Internationally, HSL has held discussions with the Vietnam People’s Navy on submarine refit work, engaged with Myanmar following the Sindhuvir transfer, and discussed defence cooperation with the Philippines – part of a wider effort to position India, and HSL specifically, as a maritime defence exporter in the Indo-Pacific. Domestically, it signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers in February 2026 to jointly pursue a large-scale national shipbuilding programme.
The yard’s finances have improved sharply in recent years, moving from losses to a record profit after tax of ₹118.82 crore in FY 2023–24 on its highest-ever production value. Raghuram inherits a shipyard with more financial headroom than it has had in years and a packed order book of strategically sensitive projects, a combination that will shape how quickly HSL can convert VAdm Sobti’s call for a deeper, life-cycle partnership into practice.