A mid-level naval officer was killed and two civilian employees of the defence shipyard Mazagon Docks Limited (MDL) suffered asphyxiation when a deadly gas leaked on board an under-construction warship at the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) on Friday. The incident has led to major panic at South Block in Delhi over its political fallout.
The accident in the defence shipyard comes a day after Finance Minister P Chidambaram told a students’ meet that the Defence Ministry was not spending its budgetary allocation “wisely” enough and that military assets suffered from lack of proper maintenance. The incident also comes in the backdrop of last week’s gas leak on Navy submarine, INS Sindhuratna, off Mumbai.
The latest gas leak on board the yet-to-be commissioned first of the Kolkata-class destroyer led to the BJP demanding Defence Minister A K Antony’s resignation.
Antony had exactly a week ago “immediately accepted” the resignation of the then Navy chief Admiral D K Joshi, who quit “owning moral responsibility” for the Sindhuratna mishap and three earlier accidents.
MDL is under the direct control of the Defence Ministry’s Department of Defence Production, which is headed by secretary G C Pati, who in turn reports directly to Antony.
The deceased naval officer, identified as Commander Kuntal Wadhwa, was testing on-board systems of the 7,000-tonne warship ahead of its acceptance trials when he and the other two MDL employees realised the leak of carbon dioxide from the firefighting system.
As they rushed out of the engine room, Wadhwa “tripped and fell on the floor” and in that process inhaled more of the poisonous carbon dioxide and collapsed, MDL spokesperson Parvez N Panthaky told Express over the phone.
“Unfortunately, the naval officer succumbed. But the two MDL employees were attended to at the hospital and were later discharged,” he said.
The incident occurred around 11 am on board the warship, Yard-701, which was to be commissioned into the Indian Navy in about a month’s time as INS Kolkata, a stealth destroyer carrying guided missiles on board.
The warship is the first of the three Project 15A warships and are follow-on orders for the Delhi class of destroyers with the MDL. Two more of the Project 15A class warships have been christened as Chennai and Kochi and are under construction at MDL.
“The warship was going through acceptance trials. But this incident is not going to be a setback for the commissioning schedule as we will either repair the carbon dioxide unit or replace it in time for the warship’s induction into the Navy,” Panthaky said. “There will also be an inquiry into the incident from the MDL’s side,” he added.
The Indian Navy, which has suffered four major accidents in the past six months, said the Yard-701 warship was still MDL’s baby and that its inspection staff members were on board the warship during trials.
While the Sindhurakshak accident had claimed the lives of 18 naval personnel, two officers died in the Sindhuratna incident on February 26 this year. The other two major accidents were the INS Talwar frigate ramming into an unlit fishing vessel in the Arabian Sea off Ratnagiri in Maharashtra on December 23 and the damage to INS Airavat amphibious warship’s propellers, which hit the seabed as it was manoeuvring docking at the Visakhapatnam dockyard in mid-January this year.
No Word From Antony
Several hours after the latest accident, neither Defence Minister Antony nor any senior officer from the ministry’s headquarters at South Block issued a statement condoling the death of the naval officer.
Resignation Sought
Mourning the loss of the naval officer, BJP on Friday demanded Defence Minister A K Antony’s resignation and sought an explanation from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the “sorry state of affairs” in the country’s maritime force.