Ship lifting

SPREAD OVER 1,200 ACRES and costing around Rs 4,000 crore, L&T’s (Fortune India 500 rank 13) shipyard at Kattupalli, near Chennai, is India’s most advanced, multipurpose integrated shipyard. The entire range of services—from port facilities to shipbuilding and repair—is in a single location. Engineers at the shipbuilding and repair complex design and manufacture frigates, submarines, and warships for the Indian Navy, and interceptor boats for coast guards, to safeguard India’s 7,500 km shoreline, as well as hi-tech commercial vessels such as liquefied natural gas carriers. The next port of call: joining the league of established players such as Japan and South Korea, famed for manufacturing large-sized warships, submarines, and other vessels. “We have shown our capability by designing and building the first nuclear submarine in the country,” says M.V. Kotwal, president (heavy engineering), L&T.

The ship-repair section boasts of four wet and six dry berths, allowing 10 ships to be handled at the same time. The massive ship lift—200 m long, 46 m wide, with a capacity to lift vessels weighing up to 20,500 tonnes—has been designed and manufactured entirely in-house.

L&T’s capability, in terms of refitting and re-engineering, also means that it can convert an ordinary ship into a highly complex and technical one like an offshore drilling vehicle. In less than a year, it has upgraded more than 12 ships.
Another first for the Kattupalli yard is its modular fabrication plant. Instead of taking the traditional route of manufacturing a ship from the lowest layer—the keel—and building the superstructure on it, the modular plant allows separate blocks of the ship to be manufactured simultaneously and then fitted into a single unit. That helps bring down the construction time considerably.

Such innovation calls for strong design capability, but that’s been smooth sailing, thanks to L&T’s state-of-the-art marine design centre in Chennai. Currently, it has more than 10 ships under construction.