The night of the explosion at Mumbai naval dock.
The Indian Navy has said it cannot salvage INS Sindhurakshak that sank at its berth in the Mumbai Naval Dock on August 14 following a series of explosions, killing all the 18 navy personnel on board. Seven bodies have so far been recovered from the submarine.
Top Naval sources told NDTV that the Navy is now looking at private salvagers to recover the submarine. However, as the Navy waits for the submarine to be pulled out of water a week after India's worst peace-time naval accident, it fears much of the crucial forensic evidence has already been lost.
Sources said that at least half a dozen salvage experts from the US and Scandinavian countries have already surveyed the damaged submarine in the last six days.
Salvaging sunken boats not only requires high-end technology but extremely specialized equipment like cranes that can negotiate weights above thousands of tons. The INS Sindhurakshak weighs over 2000 tons.
Except the US Navy, no other navy in the world has a specialized salvage arm. The Indian Navy's expertise, geared only towards rescuing people, has only once salvaged an aircraft: the Sea King helicopter which sank in 2009.
This time too, Navy divers did try to pull out trapped personnel hours after the accident. "The Indian Navy did try to bridge the breaches caused by the explosion and pump sea water out with the hope that the submarine would be able to float back to surface. The efforts weren't successful because of the nature of the damage and the breaches caused by the explosion," a senior naval official told NDTV.
While the Navy may never know what triggered the explosions, preliminary investigations reveal they may have happened in the weapons bay. Meanwhile, the Board of Inquiry, constituted to investigate the explosions, is waiting for the submarine to be salvaged to begin its probe into the tragedy.