New Delhi: With Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in Germany to deepen defence ties, a stubborn reality overshadows the visit: the long-pending Project 75(I) programme to locally build six diesel-electric submarines (SSKs), first officially approved nearly two decades ago, remains unsigned with Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, even as the Indian Navy’s underwater arm continues to hollow out.However, even if, remarkably, after almost five years of on-and-off negotiations, the deal between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and TKMS-Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL) to build six Type 214 SSKs, equipped with air-independent propulsion (AIP) and land-attack capability, is finally signed within the current financial year, the first of these boats will arrive only around 2032. Full programme completion, however, would stretch to 2037–38, if not beyond.Such an eventuality would push P75(I)’s completion to nearly three decades after its initial approval or Acceptance of Necessity, and close to four decades since the project was first envisaged in the late 1990s and early 2000s.In practical terms, this would mean that acquiring just six SSKs had occupied nearly two generations of planning, approvals, negotiations and eventual construction – turning what was meant to be a swift, structured induction programme to meet urgent operational needs, into an extended saga of delay and drift.“No self-respecting country, least of all one that aspires to be a Vishwaguru [global leader], can afford such strategic indulgence masquerading as process,” said a two-star Indian Navy veteran submariner. He went on to describe P75(I) as a “tortuous, near-endless effort that has taken decades just to reach the contract stage”.“At this pace, we are not building maritime capacity but merely institutionalising delay,” he added, declining to be named for fear of repercussions.Such an indictment is best gauged against the Indian Navy’s current SSK force levels, numbering around 17 boats. These include six Kalvari (Scorpene)-class submarines, around seven of the 10 remaining Sindhughosh-Kilo-class SSKs, and four Shishumar-Type 209/HDW-class German SSKs inducted between the 1980s and the early 2000s. However, a significant portion of this fleet is 30 to 40 years old, sustained through refits and upgrades that only exaggerate, not arrest, declining platform reliability, and rising maintenance burdens.Moreover, the retirement cycle of these legacy SSKs is no longer theoretical; it is already underway, steadily widening the gap between operational requirements and available capability. The result is an Indian Navy sub-surface force that is shrinking and becoming progressively less capable, even as the maritime threat environment grows more demanding, leaving the Indian Navy to manage decline rather than build operational muscle.Early Soviet-era Kilo-class boats, for instance, already at or beyond 35 or 40 years of service, are expected to retire between 2025 and 2030, while the German-origin Type-209s, now 30 to 38 years old, will follow between 2025 and 2032. In effect, a large proportion of the Indian Navy’s existing submarine fleet will simply disappear within the next decade, as it becomes unfeasible to extend their total technical life. The aforementioned submariner warned that the Indian Navy was not really growing its submarine arm, but instead managing a prolonged transition marked by falling numbers, delayed induction of new capability, and a widening gap between long-term plans and operational reality.This worrying operational reality was further compounded by a critical capability gap, as the navy presently operates no SSKs with AIP capability, forcing even its newest platforms – the six Project 75 (P75) French-origin Kalvari-class submarines built under licence at MDL – to snorkel frequently, sharply reducing their stealth. This inherent shortcoming stems from the fact that the indigenous AIP system developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation for these boats is technically ready, but has yet to enter service. The local AIP system is understood to have completed land-based trial, and platform installation has been deferred to later this year, or possibly to 2027.In simple terms, the technology exists, but not where it counts; and by the time it is finally deployed, analysts and industry officials believe it may not provide a decisive edge to the platforms but merely ensure that the Kalvari-class SSKs were just ‘catching up’ with competing Chinese and Pakistani submarines.Meanwhile, the submarine modernisation story reflects a clear shift from structured intent to highly diffused execution. Its 30-year submarine construction plan, approved in 1999 with clearance from the Cabinet Committee on Security soon after the Kargil War, laid out a precise and time-bound roadmap to induct 24 SSKs through two parallel production lines – one under Project-75 and the other under the follow-on Project-75(I), both envisaged with overseas collaboration.The plan was designed to ensure continuity of induction, avoid capability gaps and steadily replace ageing platforms. In concept, it was sound; in execution, it faltered badly, undone by delays, over-ambitious platform qualitative requirements (QRs), unrealistic contractual demands on foreign partners and the inability to sustain momentum across successive procurement cycles.This was succeeded by the Maritime Capability Perspective Plan, introduced around 2012–13, which did not discard the vision of the earlier 1999 scheme, but absorbed it into a broader, service-wide capability framework. Crucially, the perspective plan retained an SSK component, but in recent years with a recalibrated force structure: 18 SSKs alongside six locally designed and built nuclear-powered attack submarines, which too remain at a highly nascent stage of implementation.In practice, however, the SSK modernisation vision has been only partially realised through P75, which delivered the six Kalvari-class submarines, built under licence via technology transferred from France’s Naval Group. Yet, even this limited achievement was not without major setbacks, reflecting deeper structural and executional weaknesses in the programme.Fundamental problems surfaced soon after submarine construction began in 2007–08 at MDL, when it emerged that the original 2005 contract had omitted several critical components required for submarine construction, including engines, generators, sub-assemblies and specialised steel. This forced the Cabinet Committee on Security headed by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to approve an additional Rs 19 billion for a newly created Mazagon Procurement Materials entity to source the missing equipment and salvage the programme.The resulting delays and renegotiations – raising costs by over 10% – contributed significantly to pushing back induction timelines by more than four years to 2016–17. Former MoD financial advisor Amit Cowshish noted that such supplementary approvals for an already signed contract reflected poor planning, limited technical foresight and weak accountability for delays and cost escalation.The programme suffered further disruption in 2011 when flooding at MDL’s dockyard submerged components, including sections of a partially fabricated hull of at least one submarine. Although dismissed at the time as a minor setback, it underscored persistent executional vulnerabilities.But worse was yet to afflict P75.In 2016, one more reversal occurred when the planned acquisition of 98 Black Shark heavyweight torpedoes from Italy’s WASS was cancelled following corruption allegations against its parent company, Finmeccanica, over the procurement of 12 AW101 Augusta-Westland helicopters. Instead, the submarines were fitted with older German-origin SUT torpedoes acquired in the 1980s, which naval officers themselves described as a suboptimal substitute. Efforts to procure modern heavyweight torpedoes have since been resolved, following a recent decision to ironically acquire the same proscribed Black Shark HWTs, as the submarines themselves were configured to receive this specified ordnance.Shortly thereafter, P75 underwent a major operational-security setback after an investigative report in the Australian newspaper in August 2016 revealed extensive leaked technical data relating to the Kalvari/Scorpene-class submarines. The leak, spanning over 22,000 pages, reportedly included detailed specifications of stealth characteristics, sensor systems, combat capabilities, acoustic profiles and operational parameters.The sensitive material was said to have been compiled in 2011 in France and subsequently leaked through a former French naval officer working as a subcontractor. While the Indian Navy maintained that the leaked information posed no operational compromise due to redactions, the incident nonetheless raised serious concerns among sections of the strategic and security community.Meanwhile, the advanced follow-on P-75I followed an ever more involved trajectory.First cleared through an AoN in 2007, after deliberations that began in the late 1990s, and repeatedly reaffirmed thereafter, the programme – still unsigned 19 years later – has now reached an extended pre-contract stage, but continues to linger over Singh’s visit to Germany. This TKMS-MDL partnership itself took years to crystallise into a structured joint venture framework, with the German shipbuilder having to contend with frequently evolving requirements, stringent contractual liability provisions and extensive technology transfer obligations that it has struggled to fully meet.Earlier, submarine contenders from Japan, Sweden, Spain and Russia had also categorically refused to bid for the P-75I tender for precisely similar reasons, ultimately leaving a single-vendor situation that has still not translated into a contract with TKMS.In 2022, when P-75(I) was still inching forward at a glacial pace, the programme’s structural limitations became publicly evident. At the time, Andrey Baranov, deputy director general of the Rubin Design Bureau – one of Russia’s three main submarine design houses – categorically put the P-75(I) programme in perspective. Speaking at the Army 2022 Exhibition in Moscow, he described the SSK project as “unrealistic,” arguing that the technologies sought by the Indian Navy could not be delivered within the “strict” timelines stipulated in the MoD’s July 2021 Request for Proposal (RfP) for the six boats.Baranov further noted that the platforms’ QRs in the RfP effectively demanded a “brand new submarine type”, which would be extremely difficult to design and manufacture. “Our major concern,” he had stated, “is that the requirements specified by the Indian Navy and the timeline for the project do not match.”The Indian Navy, Baranov bluntly said, sought the latest state-of-the-art SSKs equipped with advanced weapons, AIP systems and high stealth characteristics, but no one in the world had such a submarine ready. He also pointed out a basic structural issue in the RfP, which noted that the shortlisted overseas submarine designer would be held solely responsible for the final product, without having executive control over the shipyards responsible for the platform’s construction.Baranov’s assessment of P75(I)’s ambition satirically echoed former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s remarks in 2015, when he characterised such tendencies as “QR overreach” – a phenomenon affecting all three services. At a public event in New Delhi, with then Army Chief General Bikram Singh present, Parrikar had remarked that some military QRs resembled specifications from “Marvel comic books”, describing them as “absurd, unrealistic” and often technologically non-existent.Meanwhile, the strategic consequences of the Navy’s stalled SSK programme continue to accumulate quietly. After more than two decades of planning, multiple approvals, and a contract for them still not been signed, the Indian Navy is not modernising its submarine arm but attempting, belatedly, to prevent its gradual erosion. In effect, its trajectory is no longer one of capability accretion, but of managed decline, where delay itself has become the defining feature of the SSK programme.