CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 88 of 120

Correct — D, INS Airavat. Airavat is a Shardul-class tank landing ship commissioned into the Eastern Naval Command at Visakhapatnam on 19 May 2009, and under Mission Sagar-II in November 2020 she carried food aid to Sudan, South Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea. The II in the name marks it as a later leg of a series of humanitarian deliveries India made across the Indian Ocean and its approaches through 2020, when the pandemic had disrupted supply lines to smaller and poorer states. A landing ship is the right platform for this work because she can carry bulk cargo and put it ashore where port facilities are limited.

• (a)INS Shakti — INS Shakti is a fleet replenishment tanker, built to refuel and resupply warships at sea rather than to deliver cargo to a foreign port.
• (b)INS Vikramaditya — INS Vikramaditya is an aircraft carrier and the centrepiece of a battle group; she would never be assigned a humanitarian cargo run.
• (c)INS Kesari — INS Kesari is the option most likely to be picked by mistake, because she is a sister ship of the same Shardul class and her name attaches to the same family of deployments. The ship named in Mission Sagar-II is Airavat.

Mission Sagar sits inside India's wider SAGAR framework — Security and Growth for All in the Region — under which the Navy is used as an instrument of assistance as well as of defence. The pattern is consistent: a ship carrying food, medicines or medical teams calls at several countries in one deployment, with the Navy providing the lift and the Ministry of External Affairs the diplomacy. Deployments of this kind are also how India builds standing relationships with the small island and littoral states of the Indian Ocean.

Four ship names, and the discriminator is what each ship is for. A carrier, a tanker and two landing ships cannot all be plausible for a cargo run, so the field narrows to Kesari and Airavat immediately, and after that it is a matter of attaching the right name to the right leg. That is worth doing carefully rather than guessing, because these two names recur in current-affairs papers. The broader lesson is to learn Indian ships by class and role — Vikramaditya and Vikrant are carriers, Shakti and Deepak are tankers, Shardul, Kesari and Airavat are landing ships.

• INS Airavat is a Shardul-class tank landing ship, commissioned at the Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam on 19 May 2009.
• Under Mission Sagar-II in November 2020 she delivered food aid to Sudan, South Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea.
• INS Kesari is a ship of the same Shardul class.
• INS Shakti is a fleet replenishment tanker and INS Vikramaditya an aircraft carrier.
• Mission Sagar deployments fall under India's SAGAR framework, Security and Growth for All in the Region.

• Choosing the aircraft carrier because it is the most famous name on the list; the task calls for a cargo ship.
• Swapping Kesari and Airavat, which are sister ships of the same class and appear in the same series of deployments.
• Treating Mission Sagar as a naval exercise; it is a humanitarian assistance deployment.

As a which-ship-was-involved item on a named deployment, or as a match-list pairing ships with their class or role.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  INS Airavat belongs to which one of the following classes of ships?

  • (a)Aircraft carrier
  • (b)Tank landing ship
  • (c)Fleet replenishment tanker
  • (d)Nuclear-powered submarine

  Answer(b) Tank landing ship — she is of the Shardul class, commissioned in 2009 at Visakhapatnam.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The acronym SAGAR, used for India's approach to the Indian Ocean region, stands for

  • (a)Security and Growth for All in the Region
  • (b)Strategic Alliance for Growth and Regional Access
  • (c)Sea Access and Global Access for the Region
  • (d)Safety and Guarantee for All Rim Nations

  Answer(a) Security and Growth for All in the Region — the framework under which the Mission Sagar deliveries were made.