HOW THE INDIAN NAVY NAMES ITS VESSELS

HOW THE INDIAN NAVY NAMES ITS VESSELS

The selection of names of ships and submarines of the Indian Navy is done by the Internal Nomenclature Committee (INC) at the Defence Ministry. The INC is headed by the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (Policy & Plans), and has representatives from different sections of various ministries. Names, crests and mottos of major war vessels require the assent of the President as well.

To maintain uniformity in the names of vessels of one type, the INC follows certain broad parameters, which have been enumerated in the policy guidelines.

 So, a cruiser or a destroyer is named after a state capital, a large city, or a great king or warrior from India’s history- for example, INS Delhi, INS Kolkata, INS Mysore, INS Mumbai, INS Rana and INS Ranjit. The frigates are named after a mountain range, a river or a weapon, but care is taken to ensure that the names of ships of the same class have the same initial letter. INS Sahaydri, INS Shivalik, INS Satpura, INS Talwar, INS Teg, INS Brahmaputra and INS Ganga fall in this category.

The corvettes are named after personal arms, such as the INS Khukri, INS Kripan ,and INS Khanjar, while multi-purpose patrol vessels are named after an island. Thus we have the  the INS Car Nicobar, INS Kalpani and INS Kruva. In accordance with their role, the anti-submarine warfare vessels have names  with an offensive or destructive connotation , such as INS Kamorta and INS Kadmatt.

As submarines operate underwater ,they are given either the name of a predatory fish or an abstract name associated with the ocean. The INS Arihant and INS Chakra are nuclear submarines: the conventional one have had names from INS Sindhughosh and INS Sindhukirti to INS Shalki and INS Shankul. The policy does not differentiate between the naming of the  two types of submarines.

India is in the process of building its first indigenous aircraft carrier, which has been named INS Vikrant after the first aircraft carrier that the Indian Navy bought from the British in 1957. The name for the second  indigenous aircraft carrier has not been decided yet. I t will be  named following a similar process and policy guidelines.

The Indian Navy formally decommissioned its aircraft carrier INS Viraat in march 2017, after 30 years of operational service . The ship had earlier been commissioned with the Royal Navy in 1959, and was known as HMS Hermes. India now has only one aircraft carrier, INS Vikramaditya, which was bought from Russia in 2004, it was known as Admiral Gorshkov.

How was INS Vikramaditya named? The internal nomenclature committee received proposals for various names- Vishaant, Vishwavijayi, Vishaal, Vikraal, Vaibhav, Vishwajeet ,Viddhawans, Veerendra and Visrujant. The shipping ministry informed the committee that a merchant ship had already been allotted the name Vishwavijayi. The committee the deliberated the options and unanimously chose Vikramaditya, which means The Sun Of Prowess, as a name that befits a large aircraft carrier. The historical then brought out a note on the significance of the title, which had been borne by several Indian sovereigns.