The ship was commissioned by the Indian Navy on Wednesday at the naval base at Karwar, and, in a quiet addition, was added to a puzzle that has been an issue for planners in New Delhi for over a decade how to protect the nation's own coasts from the type of submarine that doesn't need deep water to cause harm. This was unusual since the ship is in the Navy and not the Air Force, and Air Chief Marshal A P Singh took the opportunity to make some pointed remark about the pace set by the other two services, when the Navy had been self-reliant in shipbuilding years ahead. Vice Admiral Sanjay Vatsayan, commanding the Western Naval Command, said that it was the seventh commissioning of the year, and that twelve more were awaiting commissioning. That one sentence represents more of an indication of Indian defence manufacturing's true status than any amount of hyped language.

Malvan is the second ship of the class Anti-Submarine Warfare Shallow Water Craft (ASWC) built at Cochin Shipyard in Kochi and delivered to the Navy in March ahead of the formal induction on Wednesday. Its predecessor, INS Mahe, joined the fleet last November in Mumbai naval dockyard. They are part of a programme that goes back to a Defence Acquisition Council approval in December 2013 of sixteen shallow-water anti-submarine vessels, valued at a combined 13,400 crore rupees, to replace the outmoded Abhay-class corvettes which have been in service since late 1980s. Cochin Shipyard secured eight of those hulls in a contract in 2017 valued at around five thousand four hundred crore rupees, and the remaining eight are being fabricated by Garden Reach Shipbuilders, Kolkata, under the “Arnala” class contract. Twelve years have passed since the government made its decision that it needed these ships and until now, the second one has not reached the water. That's the underlying message that echoes in every congratulatory quote given on commissioning day.

The ship, itself, is designed for a very important and narrow task. It is designed to run on waterjet propulsion, not just on conventional shafts, so that it does not have to rely on being deep enough to operate away from harbours, river mouths and the sort of coastal shelf that a diesel-electric submarine could sit undetected by deep water sonar arrays. It's armed with a small number of lightweight torpedoes and anti-submarine rockets powered by hull-mounted sonar and carries a combat management system jointly developed by Bharat Electronics and the Navy's own Weapon and Electronics Systems Engineering Establishment. It's compact but it's not weak, the Navy has said, which explains the design pretty well: It's not designed to locate a nuclear boat in open ocean, it's designed to make it needlessly difficult for anything hostile to stay near an Indian port, an oil terminal or a naval base. The ship, which is named after the coastal town in Maharashtra's Sindhudurg district, and rhetorically linked to the maritime legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, has over 80 per cent indigenous content, the Ministry of Defence has said at virtually every commissioning ceremony, ranging from destroyers to frigates and now this class of shallow-water ships.

Remove the frills from the programme and there is a lot of economics to be savoured. While revenue in the three yards has grown from about eight thousand nine hundred crore rupees in 2019 to about twelve thousand four hundred crore for the first nine months of the 2025 financial year, the order books remain pretty flat at both Cochin Shipyard and Mazagon Dock and Garden Reach. Those watching the industry closely have noted that warship contracts are very unpredictable, they often have design changes during construction and that actual margins are never revealed until well into the process. The game-changer recently is forward visibility as the industry estimates that the government has placed orders for more than two lakh crore rupees for naval orders through financial years 2026 and 2027, covering 6 Project 75-India submarines, future Kalvari-class boats, next generation corvettes, P-17B frigate and perhaps a third aircraft carrier. Over the past few years, the moniker "a boost to Indian pride" has come with a price tag, with Cochin Shipyard's own stock rallying a double-digit percentage on the day of each individual contract award the markets sees these announcements more as revenue days than as patriotic ones.

This commissioning is really significant in the strategic context. In the last ten years, China's submarine fleet has been steadily increasing in its sophistication and in the number of operations conducted in the Indian Ocean region, and Pakistan's navy is set to get the Chinese-built Hangor class submarines in the next couple of years, adding to the underwater threat near India's western border. On the other hand, a class of ships designed for shallow-water, congested coastal environments fills a space for which larger frigate and destroyer classes are less well suited: between the shore and the area where blue-water assets normally operate. Whether 12 more hulls come in at the speed advertised or whether such a programme, as many such missions predict and have done before, meanders its way to the future like a swirling river will shape the future of the gap between India and the United States and its future is yet to be decided.