Discuss the significance of indigenous Diving Support Vessels for India's submarine rescue and undersea capabilities in the Indian Ocean Region.

A Diving Support Vessel (DSV) is a specialised platform for deep-sea saturation diving, salvage and submarine rescue. With the Nistar-class — India's first indigenously designed and constructed DSVs built at Hindustan Shipyard Ltd, Visakhapatnam [2] — the Navy has moved a niche, import-dependent capability in-house, with rescue, operational and strategic dividends across the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

Submarine rescue capability

• Serves as the "Mother Ship" for the Deep Submergence Rescue Vessel (DSRV), enabling evacuation of crew from a disabled submarine [1]; India's DSRV system, inducted for both seaboards, needs such a dedicated mother platform to be operationally meaningful [4].
• Critical insurance for an expanding conventional and nuclear submarine fleet, where rescue windows are measured in hours, not days.

Undersea and diving capability

• Capable of saturation diving up to 300 metres with state-of-the-art diving systems — a capability held by only a handful of navies [1].
• Displacement of about 9,350 tonnes and a 118.4-metre hull permit prolonged, self-sustained deployment far from base [2], supporting salvage, wreck location and underwater infrastructure repair.
• Complements smaller platforms such as the indigenous Diving Support Craft 'DSC A20', building a layered diving ecosystem [5].

Strategic significance in the IOR

• Ends reliance on chartered or foreign-operated DSVs during emergencies — decisive operational autonomy in a contested maritime space.
• Underpins India's first-responder and net security provider role; INS Nistar's participation in Exercise Pacific Reach 2025 at Singapore demonstrated submarine-rescue interoperability with partner navies [3].

Indigenisation dividend

• Over 80% indigenous content with 120 MSMEs involved, deepening the domestic defence-shipbuilding base under Aatmanirbhar Bharat [1].

Indigenous DSVs thus convert a humanitarian imperative — saving submariners — into strategic capital, marrying self-reliance with regional influence. Sustaining this gain requires steady follow-on orders, trained saturation-diving crews and joint rescue drills with IOR navies, so that India's blue-water ambition rests, as SAGAR envisages, on capability that is both indigenous and shared.