India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier was sold as proof that the country could build the sharpest tools of modern sea power at home. After 13 years of construction and a bill of INR 23,000 crore, INS Vikrant has finally joined the fleet, but its arrival has exposed design and integration flaws that naval planners and auditors had flagged long before the ship left the yard. The result is a flagship that looks the part at ceremonial reviews yet still struggles to deliver the combat punch its price tag implies.
The tension between symbolism and performance is not unique to India, but it is particularly stark here because the carrier is meant to anchor a broader shift toward self-reliance in defense manufacturing. Instead, the ship has become a case study in how legacy procurement choices, rushed timelines and political expectations can hardwire vulnerabilities into a platform that is supposed to last half a century.
The costly promise of an indigenous flagship
By any measure, INS Vikrant is a monumental industrial project. It took 13 years and INR 23,000 crore to bring the carrier from design table to commissioning, a span that saw shipyard capacity expanded, new supply chains created and a generation of engineers trained on a uniquely complex build. Supporters argue that this investment was the unavoidable entry fee for a country that wanted to move from buying carriers abroad to building them at home, and that the learning curve will pay off on future hulls.
Yet the same figures have sharpened scrutiny of what India actually bought for that money. As Vikrant neared commissioning, even official debates about whether the navy should pursue a third carrier cited the 13 year timeline and the INR 23,000 crore cost as a warning about tying up scarce capital in one platform, a concern captured in detailed analysis of INS Vikrant and its opportunity costs. The core question is whether a ship that still lacks key aviation systems and relies on troubled fighter jets can justify that outlay in a region where rivals are already sailing larger, more capable decks.
MiG-29K: a brittle backbone for carrier aviation
The most visible flaw everyone saw coming sits on Vikrant’s own flight deck. India ordered 45 MiG-29K fighters from Russia for $2 billion to serve as the backbone of its carrier aviation, a decision that looked pragmatic when the country acquired INS Vikramaditya but has aged poorly. A detailed Audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India later found that the MiG-29K fleet was “riddled with problems,” from engine reliability to airframe defects, raising doubts about whether enough aircraft would be available on any given day to sustain operations at sea.
Those findings were not abstract. The Audit documented how the 45 aircraft bought from Russia for INS Vikramaditya and its sister carriers suffered low serviceability, with spares and maintenance pipelines that left jets grounded for long stretches, a pattern that now shadows Vikrant as it tries to integrate the same type. The report’s focus on India’s dependence on Russia for critical components underlined how a supposedly indigenous carrier still hinges on foreign hardware, a vulnerability highlighted in assessments of the MiG-29K fleet.
Aviation Flight Complex: a carrier without its full nervous system
Even if every MiG-29K were flawless, Vikrant’s ability to operate them at scale has been constrained by the way the ship was brought into service. The carrier was commissioned without its full Aviation Flight Complex, the integrated suite of systems that manages aircraft launch, recovery, maintenance and movement across the deck. In practice, that means the ship entered the fleet before its aviation “nervous system” was fully wired, limiting the tempo and complexity of flight operations it can safely sustain.
Analysts who tracked the program noted that VIKRANT was launched without its Aviation Flight Complex, or AFC, installed, a gap that effectively turned early deployments into extended shakedown cruises rather than true combat-ready patrols. This choice reflected pressure to show progress on an indigenous carrier even if key subsystems lagged, a tradeoff that has been dissected in critiques of VIKRANT and its. The longer the AFC remains only partially integrated, the more the navy is forced to treat its most expensive ship as a test platform rather than a frontline asset.
Design compromises: ski-jump limits and heavy pitching
Vikrant’s air wing is constrained not just by its aircraft but by the shape of its own deck. The ship uses a ski-jump system that relies on jets taking off under their own power rather than being hurled into the air by catapults, a choice that simplifies engineering but forces hard tradeoffs in payload. The Vikrant’s ski-jump configuration limits how much fuel and how many missiles its fighters can carry when launching, especially in hot conditions, a disadvantage that becomes stark when compared with flat-deck carriers that use catapults to send fully loaded aircraft into the sky.
Those structural choices are compounded by how the hull behaves at sea. During trials, Another drawback observed was that VIKRANT experienced heavy pitching in high seas, a motion that complicates safe launch and recovery windows and can reduce sortie rates when the weather turns. Naval observers have warned that such pitching, if not mitigated by operational workarounds or retrofits, could leave the carrier riding out rough conditions instead of projecting power, a concern captured in assessments of VIKRANT at sea. When combined with the ski-jump’s payload limits, the result is a ship that looks imposing but may struggle to deliver sustained, heavy strikes far from shore.
Radar glitches, public hype and the symbolism of fleet reviews
Technical critiques of Vikrant’s design have not been confined to formal reports. In naval enthusiast circles, some of the sharpest criticism has focused on the carrier’s sensors, with one widely shared discussion bluntly stating that the carrier design is FLAWED and pointing to a problem with the radar integration as a core concern. Since the initial planning, these skeptics argue, the Vikrant program accepted compromises that left its situational awareness and combat systems lagging behind what a modern carrier group needs, a view that has been amplified in posts dissecting how Vikrant radar issues could ripple through the fleet.
Against that backdrop, political messaging has leaned heavily on the ship’s symbolic value. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has highlighted the majestic flightdeck of INS Vikrant with the MiG-29 fighters as proof that India is emerging as a serious player in the global defense manufacturing arena, using the carrier as a backdrop for a broader narrative of national self-confidence. That framing was reinforced when official posts celebrated the launch of INS Vikrant as a milestone in indigenous capability. The contrast between radar glitches dissected in specialist forums and the polished images from the flight deck captures the central tension of the program: a ship that is politically invaluable even as its combat systems remain a work in progress.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
