The INS Malvan commissioning is set for 22 July at Kochi, where the Indian Navy will induct the second of eight Mahe class anti-submarine warfare shallow water craft built by Cochin Shipyard Limited.

The Navy put out the date on 16 July, calling the ship the newest silhouette on the horizon.


Malvan was handed over on 31 March this year, which puts close to four months between delivery and the ceremony. The lead ship of the class moved faster. Mahe was delivered on 23 October 2025 and commissioned at the Naval Dockyard in Mumbai a month later, on 24 November.

What the INS Malvan commissioning adds at Kochi

The craft is built for the hunt close to shore. Subsurface surveillance in littoral waters, search and attack unit missions, coordinated anti-submarine work with maritime aircraft and mine warfare all sit inside the design brief, with low intensity maritime operations and search and rescue as secondary tasks. The ship carries a complement of 57, including seven officers.

Waterjet propulsion drives it, a choice that keeps the draught shallow and the handling tight in water a larger warship would rather avoid.

Armament is lightweight torpedoes and anti-submarine rockets, with hull mounted sonar feeding the picture. Indigenous content runs past 80 per cent. Reported dimensions put the ship at about 80 metres with a displacement a little over 1,100 tonnes, though the builder has published lower figures for the class and the Navy has not issued a specification sheet for this hull.

Named for a Maratha coast

Malvan takes its name from the town in Maharashtra's Sindhudurg district, ground tied closely to the maritime record of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. The name has been to sea before. An earlier INS Malwan, a minesweeper, served until 2003, and the Navy has kept up the practice of putting retired names back on new hulls.

Official paperwork has spelt the ship both ways, Malvan and Malwan. The commissioning announcement uses Malvan.

Eight from Kochi, eight from Kolkata

The programme runs on two lines. Cochin Shipyard Limited holds a 2019 contract for eight ships, the Mahe class. Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers holds a matching order for eight, the Arnala class, part of it built at a private yard. The two subclasses differ only in detail, and both trace back to a Defence Acquisition Council clearance in December 2013 for sixteen shallow water anti-submarine craft to replace the Abhay class corvettes, which entered service between 1989 and 1991.

The Arnala ships work with the Eastern Fleet. The Mahe class goes west.

Deliveries from Kochi are expected to run through to 2028. The keel of the last CSL hull was laid in May 2025, so the yard now has all eight either afloat or on the blocks. Malvan was launched at Kochi on 30 November 2023 in a simultaneous launch with Mahe and Mangrol, three hulls off the slipway on the same day.

Agray, the fourth Arnala class craft, was commissioned at Kolkata on 21 June alongside the frigate Dunagiri and the survey vessel Sanshodhak. Anjadip, third of the GRSE line, went into service at Chennai in February.

Why the shallow water gap is worth eight hulls

India's coastal waters are acoustically awkward. Shipping noise, river outfall, temperature layering and a heavy fishing presence all work against sonar in exactly the bands where a diesel electric boat running on batteries is quietest. A frigate built for blue water anti-submarine work is not the right instrument there, and it is an expensive one to tie down inside the twelve mile line.

That was the case put to the Defence Acquisition Council in 2013, and it has not weakened since. Chinese submarine deployments into the Indian Ocean have grown steadier over the past decade. The approaches to India's ports and offshore fields are where a boat gets closest to something worth hitting.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told sailors at Visakhapatnam on 10 July that India stands as the primary guarantor of peace and stability in the Indian Ocean Region, pointing to the 90 per cent of national trade by volume that moves by sea.

A crowded summer for the fleet

The INS Malvan commissioning will make the ship the fifth indigenous platform to join the Navy inside about a month. Mahendragiri, the sixth Project 17A stealth frigate, was commissioned at Visakhapatnam on 11 July, the last of the four Mazagon Dock hulls of that class. Dunagiri, Sanshodhak and Agray came in together at Kolkata three weeks before that.

The Ministry of Defence has pointed to the run as evidence that Indian yards can hold a delivery cadence across several programme lines at once.

Malvan enters service on 22 July.