Kochi, 2036. The ship that is docked does not look anything like the kind of vessels that made headlines a decade ago. LPG or crude carriers that the Indian Navy had to escort from the Gulf of Oman after they made the painful and dangerous crossing of the Strait of Hormuz, delivering fuel for India while the US-Iran war raged on.
This ship is different. Squat and purposeful with winches and cranes on a reinforced working deck, with thick coils of cables spooled below deck. A moonpool at the stern opens a shaft into the sea, where an ROV can descend two kilometres to the seabed when needed. She will sail not to conquer the Srivijaya kingdom, but for cable routes across the Indian Ocean, to connect new-age data centres. Her crew won’t depend on the pole star or birds or Monsoon winds, but on live satellite data and an AI-assisted navigation plan.
She is an entirely new class of ship, a multipurpose subsea construction vessel, whose hull can be fitted as needed. She becomes a cable layer for one charter, and a deepsea mining support platform for a different organisation on her next voyage. A decade ago, there were only a few ships like her. Allseas Group’s Hidden Gem, Boskalis’ Ndeavor and Ndurance, and the Olympic Ares owned by DeepOcean, for instance.
These kinds of ships exist and are being built more and more in 2036 because two major things happened at once in the world a decade ago. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence and the global demand for data centres made the world hungrier for undersea data cables than at any point in the internet’s history. Second, the deep seabed became a contested resource frontier, almost as much as sea-level trade routes, because the world needed more critical minerals and magnets that power every battery, server and gadget on the planet.
Now, back to the present
State-of-the-art, large-scale shipyards are already starting to appear as sci-fi in leading shipbuilding hubs of the world. The dominating scene is no longer just dozens of workers with welding torches upon a vast open dry dock. Robotic arms are moving with predicted precision along modular hull sections. Live digital twins of the vessel under construction and the entire production line are updated on large screens where engineers are simulating stress points, optimising processes and fixing problem areas before they occur. In another bay, dual-fuel propulsion systems designed for ammonia or methanol are being installed while elsewhere, multipurpose vessels are being refitted for their next charter.
This is already the cutting edge of shipbuilding. This is the technological standard that any nation serious about shipbuilding must aspire to reach.
While this article was being written, China launched its largest self-propelled, all-electric, deep-sea cable-laying vessel, named Blue Sea Navigator, in Jiangsu. China claims it is the most advanced ship of its kind.
A world where China builds the ships that the US needs to protect its technology from China
In January 2022, somewhere in the South China Sea, a US Navy F-35C stealth fighter jet, arguably the most advanced stealth fighter in the world, crashed off the USS Carl Vinson and sank to the bottom. The South China Sea is China’s play area, so the US Navy launched a frantic effort to salvage the jet, lest China gets its hands on their stealth technology. To lift a jet that weighs over 16,000 kgs, was not an easy task, and there are very few ships in the world that can do it. They hired Singapore-based Ultra Deep Solutions (UDS) for the task.
The F-35C crashed in the #SouthChinaSea has been retrieved by US Navy-contracted diving support construction vessel Picasso, Mar 2.
— SCS Probing Initiative (@SCS_PI) March 4, 2022
A surveillance ship, an oiler, a LMSR ship, and a destroyer were spotted around site to support the salvage operation. pic.twitter.com/4KI2kJ3Gay
A team of salvage experts on board the beautiful bright red Picasso sent down an ROV named CURV-21 to attach specialised rigging to the jet at the seabed, and lifted the behemoth from below 12,400 feet of seawater on March 2. Nobody knows how much the operation cost, but it must have been less than the $100 million stealth fighter, or the insurmountable risk of China obtaining the latest stealth tech, developed with investment of several billion dollars, for the US government.
In this story, there lies an irony brighter than the five vivid red diving support construction vessels (DSCV) currently operated by UDS, all named after famous painters: Picasso, Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Matisse. They were all built by China Merchants Heavy Industries.
So the US Navy, running frantic efforts to prevent its stealth jet technology falling into the hands of China, had nowhere else to go other than China-built DSCVs There lies a lesson too. That in the world of shipbuilding, dominance is not only about who builds the most DWT; it is also about who builds the kind of ship nobody else has bothered to build, until the day everyone suddenly needs one.
India’s priorities now
As discussed in the previous articles, India remains a minor player in global commercial shipbuilding and has a long way to go before even being in the top 10. The gaps in building a diverse variety of ships as per commercial demand, advanced green designs, indigenous design depth, cost competitiveness, skilled workforce availability, and domestic supply-chain maturity are substantial. However, the policy, intent and architecture are in place. Early commercial orders have started flowing in, and the first technology partnerships with leading global yards have begun, indicating a change in trajectory soon enough.
The plan ahead should not be about dreaming of instant parity with China and South Korea, but to chart a lasting path that converts the early signals into sustained capability.
New horizons are opening up, and new world will need many more new ships
For centuries, the world’s shipping map had the same popular routes: Suez, Gibraltar, Hormuz, Cape, Panama, Malacca, Bosphorus. That map is changing already. Warming climates are making the Northern Sea Route commercially viable for the first time, and Russia is already prepared with its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers. The Russian State nuclear organisation Rosatom, which operates the nuclear icebreaker fleet, has been appointed as the sole authority of the NSR. This means any ship that transits the NSR has to apply for approval from Rosatom first, submitting detailed ship and voyage data.
This 75,000 horsepower monster is the world’s biggest nuclear-powered icebreaker.
— Universal Curiosity (@UniverCurious) June 26, 2021
Check out the amazing clips of Yamal icebreaker by TimelabPro
via @gigadgets_ pic.twitter.com/3Ma99VdnxH
Ships with the Arc-7 ice-class reinforced hull designs with stronger propulsion can navigate the NSR without being towed by a Russian ice breaker. They are considerably more expensive to build and currently only a handful of yards in Russia and South Korea can build them.
As of now, India does not have Arctic shipping ambitions, but the point is, the Arctic is going to be the new avenue for global commercial shipping, for purely geographical reasons. For East Asian exporters, the route can shorten distances to northern Europe by up to 40% compared with the traditional Suez passage, and like Suez and Hormuz, a lot of global cargo is going to move through the Arctic Ocean in coming years.
Another avenue where specialised shipbuilding is going to be crucial is deep-sea exploration, mining and research. The global contest for critical minerals and rare earth elements is gaining pace, driving exploration of polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich crusts and rare-earth-bearing sediments on the deep ocean floor.
Working in the deep sea needs purpose-built mining vessels, collector systems and specialised support ships. That competition is going to be harsh, just like the oil race, and only a few nations with a competitive edge in shipbuilding and exploration capabilities will be the sellers, while the rest will only be buyers.
The push for energy transition is building a new demand for ships that run on ammonia, methanol, and liquid hydrogen, as well as solar power and nuclear power. Explosive growth of data centres and artificial-intelligence infrastructure underlines the need for sophisticated cable-laying ships capable of installing and maintaining the dense network of subsea fibre-optic cables that carry global digital traffic.
In each of these domains above, the countries that build the specialised ships will also gain prime access to resources, profits and strategic influence.
India’s path ahead
India is not at all a bystander in all the above domains discussed. In 2025, India under the Modi government secured exclusive rights from the International Seabed Authority to explore polymetallic sulphides along the Carlsberg Ridge (10,000 square km) in the Indian Ocean, making it the first country to hold two separate seabed sulphide exploration contracts. A previous contract for polymetallic nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin already exists. It is aligned with India’s Deep Ocean Mission, a ₹4,077 crore, multi-year program that also includes the Samudrayaan project and the Matsya 6000 manned submersible.
Maritime India Vision 2030 is steering India's maritime transformation with enhanced port capacity, growing cargo throughput, stronger shipbuilding capabilities, thriving cruise tourism, and world-class maritime infrastructure.
— Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (@shipmin_india) July 22, 2026
Building a future-ready maritime ecosystem for a… pic.twitter.com/KMFkvKqU1G
During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to Russia in July 2024, he and President Putin decided to set up a joint working body for the NSR. In October that year, the first meeting of that working group took place in New Delhi. The second meeting took place in 2025. India and Russia are already in talks over cargo transit targets, possible training of Indian sailors for polar navigation, and joint projects in Arctic shipbuilding.
With the new ₹69,725 crore push, the new clusters, the HD Hyundai and CMA CGM deals, and the Deep Ocean Mission and overall, a rare convergence of prosperity outlook, ambition and committed State policy at the helm, India may just have the right recipe to cross these uncharted waters, being a player in the global shipbuilding game.
A thousand years in waiting
For the first time since the Cholas of 11th century, for the first time in a thousand years, India has not just the right coastline, but the political intent, and a promising industrial potential to make it.
A thousand years before anyone wrote a 5-year vision document, Rajendra Chola read the Monsoon winds and the trade environment of his time. He knew he needed maritime dominance to make his kingdom prosper, and with the will of a braveheart, he projected the power of his empire thousands of kilometres away from his shores.
This 3-part series has been written with an underlying, unuttered question so far. Can policy alone rebuild what we lost to cruel churns of history? The coast is the same, the Monsoon still blows, but the technology has changed. When readers read the three articles, they will also find the underlying answer. No, not policy alone, but policy carefully planned, executed with the right intent, and aimed at the right goal can achieve success.
Rajendra Chola was not targeting the top-10 global position. He read the winds of change; he saw the ocean as a highway, and he projected power with all he had. He built his ships strong enough to accomplish his goals. If India is going to reclaim any part of that thousand-year-old legacy, we need to build ships that will accomplish ours.
This is the last article of the Shipbuilding series. The first and second articles can be read here and here.
