Record dispatch of Warship Grade Plates by BSP for Indian Navy in current FY
| Date :05-Nov-2019 |
Staff Reporter :
BHILAI
SAIL-BSP has been producing high strength anti-submarine warship grade plates in the Plant’s Plate Mill for use by Indian Navy. SAIL has been producing the required steels for Indian Railways, for dams, bridges and skyscrapers and for critical and important projects of national importance in defence, energy sector, space exploration and making valuable import substitution. While the Bhilai Steel Plant has been producing ship building grade plates for several decades including plates for export to European ship building industry, the DMR 249 A warship grade plates that the Plant has been producing for Indian Navy has been used in building the hull of India’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier INS Vikrant and other class of smaller warships, including anti-submarine stealth warships. These warship grade plates were earlier being imported from Russia.
With the Indian Navy having launched an ambitious programme of expansion of its fleet of warships, SAIL-Bhilai has been looking forward to continue to partake in naval defence programmes. In the seven months period from April to October in the current fiscal year, BSP has supplied record volume of 5060 tonnes of DMR grade plates to the different the state owned ship builders, including Mazagon Dock Ltd, Mumbai, Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE), Kolkata and Cochin Shipyard etc. This is the highest ever despatch of DMR grade plates from Bhilai in entire 12 months period of any fiscal year since inception. In 2017-18 and 2018-19, BSP had supplied 2263 Tonnes and 2387 T of DMR grade plates, respectively. It was only in year 2008 when the Plant despatched higher volumes of DMR grade plates.
However in that year, the total volume of DMR grade produced included about 2000 T of plates that were supplied to sister plant Rourkela for further processing. In the month of Oct 2019, the Plant has despatched 1515 Tonnes of DMR grade plates, which is the highest in any month in last five years. While the regular ship-building plates produced by BSP for manufacture of commercial ships have certification from Lloyds Register Asia (LRA), American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and Det Norske Veritas (DNV), the naval grade DMR 249 A plates are inspected by personnel from the Quality Assurance Establishment (Naval) that is authorised by the Navy to carry out inspection of naval grade plates.