She served the Indian Navy and the nation for over 36 years and could have become only the second submarine museum of the country. But since her decommissioning in 2010, the Russia-designed submarine INS Vagli has taken a tedious and uncertain course. She currently lies idle at the Chennai port.
The submarine, which was to be the centrepiece of the maritime heritage museum planned by the Tamil Nadu government in the tourist town of Mamallapuram, was expected to be displayed on a 30-acre stretch of land near the Shore Temple of the UNESCO-declared World Heritage group of monuments.
However, the inability of a contractor to mount the submarine on the intended site at Mamallapuram has forced the vessel to lie idle at the Chennai port. While government sources say on condition of anonymity that the project turned out to be a “white elephant” and that they have urged the Navy to “take back” the vessel, Navy sources deny having received any such proposal.
An official of the Chennai Port Trust confirmed that the submarine was still lying in its premises. “Officials have been regularly paying the dues,” the official added.
The Tamil Nadu government, under Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had in June 2012 decided to set up the maritime museum with the submarine, and senior Navy officials handed over INS Vagli to it in April 2013. In November that year, the then Tourism Minister S.P. Shunmuganathan visited Visakhapatnam along with senior officials to study the museum there, housed in the decommissioned submarine INS Kursura.
Since then, INS Vagli has witnessed a series of unfortunate incidents.
This undated photo handed out by the Indian Navy on December 10, 2010 shows a Foxtrot-class submarine Type 641B in an undisclosed location. The Indian Navy decommissioned one of her oldest units, INS Vagli in a ceremony at the Naval Dockyard on December 09, 2010.INS Vagli was commissioned by then Lieutenant Commander Lalit Talwar on 10 Aug 1974 at Riga, Latvia, in the erstwhile Soviet Union. She was the first of the 'Vela' class of submarines to be commissioned into the Indian Navy.AFP PHOTO/HO/Indian Navy
In January 2014, a worker died of asphyxiation while trying to clean the submarine. He was attempting to retrieve his cellphone, which had fallen into the vessel. Two others were hospitalised in the incident.
Later that year, in April, a company that was awarded a contract towed the vessel to Mamallapuram, only to find that the submarine could not be mounted on the intended platform at the historic town. In June that year, INS Vagli was towed back to Chennai port.
Meanwhile, in April 2015, a petitioner moved the Madras High Court, seeking to find an alternative site for setting up the museum, contending that the submarine being a “huge piece of voluminous scrap” had the “potentiality of inviting lightning”. However, the petition was dismissed by the Madras High Court, which observed that the matter fell purely within the administrative domain.
A 2016 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India questioned the process adopted by the government to move the submarine to Mamallapuram in one piece and observed that an “infructuous expenditure of ₹4.41 crore” was incurred due to a lack of proper planning.
In December 2016, the submarine was almost damaged when Cyclone Vardah hit the Chennai coast.
INS Vagli was commissioned into the Indian Navy at Riga in Latvia, which was part of the erstwhile Soviet Russia in 1974, and was decommissioned at Visakhapatnam in December 2010.
