NEW DELHI: With an eye on the Pakistan border and the eastern Indian Ocean, the Army and Navy have initiated the acquisition of high-speed amphibious combat boats capable of operating seamlessly across sea, marshes and land.
The boats will improve mobility in the disputed Sir Creek sector and strengthen the Andaman and Nicobar Command.
The defence ministry has issued the tender or RFP (request for proposal) for nearly a dozen such rigid hull amphibious boats under the 'Buy (Indian)' category with a minimum 60% indigenous content, with the majority of them earmarked for the Army in Gujarat's Kutch region and the rest for the Navy at Mumbai and Port Blair. The bids are due in next three months, with all deliveries to be completed within 24 months of the contract being inked.
The boats will be operated in the creek sector by the Army's Corps of Engineers, whose specialised sapper units have long been trained and equipped for operations in the treacherous tidal marshes, where the terrain is neither fully land nor water.
"Conventional boats run aground in the creeks at low tide, while wheeled vehicles get bogged down in the slush. Thus, these platforms will allow troops to patrol, intercept and insert small teams across the mudflats and shallow channels without a break in mobility," a source explained.
Armed with fore and aft weapon mounts and ballistic protection, the boats can undertake anti-infiltration patrols at sea at speeds exceeding 40 knots while carrying a dozen fully combat-loaded soldiers with a payload of over 1,500 kg.
On land, the boats must manage 10-15 kmph on all-wheel drive through hydraulically operated retractable legs, climb 15-degree gradients and be transportable by road on heavy tank transporters as well as by air in the IL-76 and C-17 aircraft for swift inter-theatre deployment.
The 96-km Sir Creek, a tidal estuary opening into the Arabian Sea between Kutch and Pakistan's Sindh province, has remained an unresolved dispute for decades. Pakistan claims the entire creek up to its eastern bank, while India holds the boundary runs mid-channel, a disagreement that also blocks the delimitation of the maritime boundary and the exclusive economic zones beyond.
The un-demarcated marshlands, along with the adjoining Harami Nala, have long been exploited by smugglers, drug couriers and Pakistani fishing boats, with the 26/11 Mumbai attackers having come by sea after hijacking an Indian fishing trawler. Moreover, intelligence assessments had last year flagged new Pakistani forward posts, fortified bunkers and infrastructure coming up in the sector after Operation Sindoor.
Defence minister Rajnath Singh, in fact, had bluntly warned Pakistan from Bhuj last October that any misadventure in Sir Creek would invite a response that would change "both history and geography", pointedly adding that one route to Karachi, which lies barely 200 km away, passes through the creek.
The security grid in the creeks currently rides on a mix of platforms, with the BSF operating floating border outposts, fast patrol boats and all-terrain vehicles, backed by its ‘Creek Crocodile’ commandos who patrol the Harami Nala stretch on foot and by boat. But these assets are either boats or vehicles, with none capable of transitioning between water and land, a gap the new boats will bridge, the sources said.
For the Navy, in turn, the boats will add amphibious mobility across the widely dispersed islands of the Andaman and Nicobar Command, which is being progressively strengthened as a forward outpost against China's expanding footprint in the Indian Ocean Region.
