INS Malvan commissioned into the Indian Navy at Karwar on 22 July 2026, entering service as the second of eight Mahe-class Anti-Submarine Warfare Shallow Water Craft designed and built in India. The ceremony carried a first with it. Malvan is the first warship the Navy has commissioned at Karwar.

Air Chief Marshal AP Singh, Chief of the Air Staff, presided over the event at the Karwar base, home to the Indian Navy's INS Kadamba. Vice Admiral Sanjay Vatsayan, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Western Naval Command, hosted the ceremony. Other senior naval officers, representatives from Cochin Shipyard Ltd and veterans of the earlier ship filled the audience.


INS Malvan commissioned as Karwar's first naval ship

That distinction ran right through Vice Adm Vatsayan's welcome.

INS Malvan commissioned as the seventh ship the Navy has inducted this year, he noted, part of a steady run of warship commissionings, with at least twelve more to follow. He set the milestone inside a broader push he called India's growing self-reliance in defence manufacturing. The craft carries more than 80 percent indigenous content, and Vatsayan tied that figure to the confidence the service now places in its own shipbuilding base. He commended the warship production and acquisition team alongside the designers, engineers and industry partners who delivered the platform.

He called Malvan a working measure of how far Indian shipbuilding has come, and read the handover of a frontline ship of this kind as proof of a home industrial base that can now be trusted with it.

An indigenous anti-submarine craft

The Mahe class is built for the hunt close to shore. Malvan is meant to track and attack submarines in shallow coastal waters and to work with larger surface combatants, submarines and aviation assets on coordinated anti-submarine operations. All eight craft in the class are being built by Cochin Shipyard at its Kochi yard, part of India's home base of naval design and system integration.

The Ministry of Defence, in its commissioning release, lists the craft's tasks as underwater surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, low intensity maritime operations and mine warfare. That mix is meant to strengthen coastal defence, tighten littoral security and sharpen the Navy's picture of the waters around India. Malvan is the sixth of sixteen such craft the Navy is inducting overall.

Malvan was delivered on 31 March, about four months before the ceremony, a timeline IDW set out in its commissioning preview. The lead ship, Mahe, entered service at Mumbai in November last year.

The crest, the motto and the name

Malvan's crest carries the Bagh Nakha, the tiger's claw, standing for bravery, warfare tactics, agility and audacity, with the ship built to attack rapidly and strike silently. The waves worked around the claw stand for the seas along India's coasts and the Navy's resolve to keep watch over them and over the nation's sovereignty. Its motto, Silent Claws, is meant to read as lethality and stealth, and the power to strike an adversary swiftly.

The name reaches back in two directions. It comes from the coastal town of Malvan in Maharashtra, bound up with the maritime legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and it carries forward the earlier INS Malwan.

That older ship served the Navy as an inshore minesweeper for nineteen years before it was retired in 2003, a run recalled at the ceremony as distinguished service to the nation. Some of its veterans stood in the crowd at Karwar to watch the name go back to sea.

Air Chief's message on sea lanes and jointness

ACM AP Singh used his address to press the case for protecting sea lines of communication. Unimpeded maritime trade, he told the gathering, is foundational to the country's economic success at a time of global uncertainty.

He praised the Navy's growth and its work towards the Aatmanirbhar Bharat goal, pointing again to the warship's indigenous content. Then he drew a lesson from the way the Navy plants its own officers inside the shipbuilding process, arguing the same practice could speed self-reliance across the wider defence sector. He closed on jointness, calling for the Army, Navy and Air Force to fight as one in future conflicts.

What Malvan adds to the fleet

The induction hands the Navy another dedicated anti-submarine platform for the littorals, one that can work with bigger warships, submarines and maritime aircraft. The service reads the addition as one more step towards a fleet it calls combat ready, credible and cohesive, and one able to safeguard India's maritime interests at all times and across every stretch of sea. Vatsayan set it against the rising weight of the maritime domain and the Indian Ocean region in the country's security thinking, a shift he said only sharpens the value of a ship built for the coastal hunt.

With Mahe and Malvan now in service, Cochin Shipyard has six more craft in the class still to deliver.