Sea trials for floating missile test range INS Anvesh begin this month

The FTR will not only speed up the missile projects of DRDO but also allow live testing of interceptor missiles for phase II of Ballistic Missile Defence program.

Published on: Sep 7, 2021, 08:55:27 IST

By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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Sea trials of India's first floating missile test range (FTR), INS Anvesh, are set to begin this month with the ship expected to be commissioned in the next two months. Built by Cochin Shipyard and designed by the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), the nearly 9000 tonne ship will be used to test missiles up to range of 1500 kilometers deep inside the Indian Ocean without the threat to population or sea traffic as well as land mass limitation.

India is expected to commission at least four ships this year with ballistic missile tracking ship INS Dhruv being handed over to National Research Technical Organization (NTRO) on September 10. Stealth guided missile destroyer INS Vishakapatnam and diesel attack submarine INS Vela, fourth of the Kalvari class, will also be commissioned by the end of the year.

Once commissioned, the FTR INS Anvesh will bring futuristic missile projects up to speed as it will provide for a ready-made safety corridor without going through the tedious exercise of issuing NOTAMs to ships and aircraft flying in the area. While the DRDO missile testing site at Wheeler Island off Odisha is under the scanner of the adversaries, the FTR will also allow discreet testing of missiles and torpedoes 400 to 500 nautical miles into the sea.

While only a select group of nations operate FTRs, the DRDO has specific plans to use the vessel, equipped with electro-optical missile tracking, S-band radar tracking, telemetry devices apart from a launch pad, control and mission control center, for testing its phase II of Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) interceptor missiles. The phase II of the BMD envisages intercepting and destroying enemy missile up to range of 2000 kilometers by kinetic force with the FTR allowing live testing of the interdictor missiles and not computer simulations.

The FTR will also allow for live missile and torpedo firing by the Navy as well as surface-to-surface tactical missiles with the Indian Army.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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