Chandigarh: The commissioning of PNS Hangor, the first of eight Hangor-class air-independent propulsion (AIP)-equipped diesel-electric submarines (SSKs), into the Pakistan Navy (PN) on Thursday (April 30), highlights a widening contrast with the Indian Navy (IN)’s still-unfinished effort to finalise a comparable six-boat programme, nearly three decades after it was first conceived.While Islamabad is already inducting new SSKs built with Chinese assistance, the IN remains locked in prolonged negotiations with Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) for six AIP-enabled submarines with land-attack capability, to be constructed under Project 75-I (P75-I) in an $8-10 billion joint venture, with Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL) in Mumbai.The obvious difference between the two rival navies lies in acquisition tempo and execution.Pakistan has moved from contract to commissioning in about a decade, while India has spent nearly twice that period still navigating procurement and contract negotiations for a smaller, but broadly analogous class of SSKs.This divergence is further sharpened by symbolism as much as by history, and the enduring undercurrent of India-Pakistan rivalry. The submarine’s name, Hangor (meaning shark), directly references the PN submarine that sank the IN frigate INS Khukri during the 1971 war – a legacy that continues to shape the competitive framing of undersea capability between the two opposing sides.Hangor’s commissioning by Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari took place in Sanya, on the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island, marking a high-profile demonstration of deepening naval cooperation between the neighbours as part of their increasingly advanced and integrated military partnership. Significantly, Sanya hosts a major People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) submarine base, underscoring the strategic context of the SSK commissioning.The PN’s Hangor SSKs are part of a wider China-Pakistan submarine programme valued at an estimated $5 billion, involving a total order of eight boats derived from the PLAN’s Type 039B/S20 design lineage.Production is split evenly: four submarines are being first built in China by Wuchang Shipbuilding under the China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Corporation, and four thereafter at Pakistan’s Karachi Shipyard & Engineering Works, under a transfer-of-technology arrangement.All eight SSKs are, for now, scheduled for induction by 2028, a goal that analysts claim was ‘plausible’ under China’s support, given its highly industrialised submarine production base. They said Chinese shipyards had, in recent years, demonstrated the ability to serially produce submarines at a faster tempo than most global peers, leveraging modular construction and integrated supply chains to compress design-to-delivery cycles. Hence, such a two-to-three year timeline for Hangor-class boats remains feasible, supported as it was by China’s streamlined naval production infrastructure.Fitted with modern sensors, torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles, these AIP-equipped Hangor-class boats – with significantly enhanced submerged endurance and stealth – are designed to strengthen the PN’s undersea warfare capability, improving its capacity for sustained sea-denial and anti-surface operations.Naval analysts view these submarines primarily as sea-denial platforms, focused on maritime interdiction, surface warfare and undersea ambush roles, rather than inland precision strikes.Zardari called these SSK inductions a milestone in building a “robust, balanced and credible” defence posture, with PN Chief of Staff Admiral Naveed Ashraf emphasising the need to secure maritime choke points and protect sea lines of communication across the Arabian Sea and the wider Indian Ocean Region.Operationally, the Hangor class represents a steady enhancement of Pakistan’s undersea posture. The combination of AIP endurance, artificial intelligence-fitted sensors and anti-ship weapons would enable longer SSK patrol cycles, while integration with increasingly networked systems points to a gradual shift towards a more modernised undersea doctrine, closely aligned with PLAN’s submarine design philosophy and China’s maritime ambitions.Meanwhile, the IN’s P75-I – envisaged as the next step in the IN’s SSK modernisation – remains stalled at the contracting stage. Intended to deliver six advanced AIP-enabled submarines with expanded combat roles, including land-attack capability, the programme has been slowed by prolonged negotiations involving the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the TKMS-MDL partnership.Over the past several years, P75-I discussions have centred on technology transfer, evolving qualitative requirements and the complexities of aligning domestic shipbuilding capacity with foreign collaboration. What was conceived as a bridge to the future has, instead, become a case study in procedural drift.This was further underscored by the fact that defence minister Rajnath Singh travelled to Germany last month to advance broader bilateral defence ties, yet no discernible progress on P75-I appears to have emerged from the visit.The consequences of these extended delays in P75-I are already visible in the state of the IN’s existing SSK fleet.It presently operates a mixed inventory of 16-17 largely legacy Soviet/Russian and German-origin SSKs, comprising six to seven Sindhughosh (Kilo-class) and four Shishumar (HDW Type 209/1500) boats, many dating back to the 1980s and early 1990s. However, despite upgrades and life extensions, these platforms remain constrained by inherent limitations in stealth, endurance and survivability in an era of increasingly sophisticated and advanced anti-submarine warfare capabilities.Several of these 10-11 odd older boats are now approaching the end of their service lives. Early Kilo-class submarines, for instance, already in service for over three decades, were expected to retire between 2025 and 2030, while the German-origin Type 209s will follow over a similar timeframe. In effect, a significant portion of India’s existing SSK fleet is set to phase out within the next decade.The six French-origin Kalvari-class (Scorpene) SSKs, inducted between 2017 and 2024, represent a qualitative platform improvement, with better acoustic signatures and modern combat systems, but they lack AIP capability.And, though an indigenous fuel-cell AIP system designed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation has concluded land-based trials, its integration into the submarines is still awaited. This AIP installation is likely to take place only during forthcoming SSK refit cycles, beginning later this year or in early 2027, and is expected to be completed by 2028-29.The follow-on P75-I was intended to address a critical structural gap – adding both numbers and capability while strengthening domestic industrial capacity. Instead, its prolonged gestation has widened the very gap it was meant to close, turning a planned transition into a protracted shortfall.For the past 19 years, P75-I has moved neither fast enough to deliver capability nor decisively enough to reform itself. The result is a procurement system more adept at prolonging decisions than executing them – where timelines expand, costs escalate and operational urgency is steadily diluted, inversely proportional to rising tensions with collusive nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan.Furthermore, even under optimistic assumptions, the programme’s schedule appears increasingly stretched.Official assessments indicate that even if the P75-I deal is finalised by the end of the current financial cycle, which concludes in March 2027, the first submarine is unlikely to be commissioned before 2032. The full six-boat programme would then extend to 2037-38, if not beyond – effectively pushing meaningful fleet renewal well into the following decade.By that point, a significant portion of the existing SSK force will have either retired or be nearing obsolescence, even as service lives are extended through elaborate jugaad or incremental life-extension measures. This would create a situation in which new P75-I inductions would end up merely replacing outgoing platforms, rather than decisively augmenting overall capability.Set against the commissioning of PNS Hangor, the comparison between the PN and IN submarine programmes becomes less about platform capability than about execution. The China-Pakistan submarine deal was signed in 2015, following a relatively short negotiation phase, leading to the induction of the first boat on Thursday – a roughly decade-long cycle from agreement to service entry. India’s P75-I, by comparison, traces its origins to planning discussions in the late 1990s and receiving formal approval by the MoD in 2007, only to be repeatedly delayed.Senior industry officials in Mumbai noted that such inertia reflected not merely delay, but a deeper dysfunction in defence acquisition. They stated that a programme conceived as a bridge to enhancing future operational naval capability had become trapped in an extended loop of shifting requirements, procedural caution and institutional indecision.“This is especially acute in the unforgiving domain of undersea warfare, where capability is measured in decades of continuity rather than episodic bursts of induction,” said a senior official associated with naval shipbuilding. Once momentum is lost, it becomes difficult to recover, he added, requesting anonymity.To conclude, in age and composition, the IN and PN SSK fleets remain mismatched, with the numerical advantage resting with the former, due to its broader mix of older and relatively modern platforms.But the PN, though much smaller, is in transition, structured around three AIP-capable French-origin Agosta 90B-class submarines, two ageing Agosta 70-class boats and the incoming Hangor-class SSKs.But crucially, this transition is being underwritten and managed by China, which has strong expertise in building SSK swiftly and at scale, making it a key enabler of such force expansion for the PN. Its role goes beyond supply to include design support, technology transfer and long-term sustainment, effectively shaping both the pace and structure of the PN’s sub-surface capability development.