On marine engine production, India must set sail on its own

Indian Express

5 days ago

India is making bold moves in shipbuilding. The 2025 Union budget laid the foundation for a maritime resurgence, with mega clusters, a Rs 25,000-crore Maritime Development Fund, customs duty exemptions, and infrastructure status for large vessels. Strategic tie-ups with global shipbuilding giants and major private investments signal serious intent to make India a top five shipbuilding nation by 2047.
To truly lead, India must build what powers the ship. A hull without an engine is just a shell, strategically dependent on foreign suppliers. Marine engines typically account for 15–20 per cent of a ship's cost and are central to its performance, emissions, and life cycle.
Presently, over 90 per cent of engines rated above 6 MW installed on Indian commercial and naval vessels are sourced from a concentrated group of five global manufacturers — MAN Energy Solutions (Germany), Wärtsilä (Finland), Rolls-Royce (UK), Caterpillar-MaK (US/Germany), and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan). This oligopolistic concentration creates a technological chokepoint. Any disruption in diplomatic or trade relations, export control regime, or intellectual property licensing can effectively immobilise India's shipbuilding programme.
These engines are embedded with proprietary ECUs, closed-source control software, and IP-restricted components, making India dependent on foreign firms not just for procurement, but for diagnostics, updates, and even spares. This exposes India to rising export control risks. Key supplier countries have tightened regulations under frameworks like the EU Dual-Use Regulation, US EAR, and Japan's METI controls. These can be denied on national security grounds at any time.
India has already begun taking steps in this direction. In April, the Indian Navy signed a Rs 270-crore sanction order with Kirloskar Oil Engines Limited to design and develop a 6 MW medium-speed marine diesel engine. However, the real game is for 30MW.
There are several challenges. First, we lack access to modern marine engine designs. Marine engine design is a critical determinant of propulsion efficiency, thermal performance, emissions compliance, structural durability, and system integration in large vessels. These designs must optimise key parameters to meet International Maritime Organization Tier III emission standards and enable integration with hybrid propulsion, waste heat recovery. India currently lacks indigenous design capabilities. This leads to dependence on foreign OEMs. This dependency restricts the ability to modify engines for military profiles, optimise for local climatic and operational conditions, or transition to fuel-flexible, autonomous maritime systems.
Second, India's most significant hurdle in building large marine engines is metallurgical, a foundational challenge that cuts across materials science, manufacturing precision, and component durability. Marine engines operate under extreme thermal and mechanical conditions. Components must be engineered from alloys that can withstand high thermal gradients, resist corrosion in saline environments, and perform reliably over long duty cycles. Materials like high-chromium steels, nickel-based superalloys, and thermally stable composites are essential, but India's capacity to produce such materials in large quantities remains underdeveloped. This is where we are struggling in our jet engines programme, too.
Third, 'tribology', the science of wear, lubrication, and friction, is another critical bottleneck. High-efficiency marine engines demand components with tailored surface properties to reduce wear and frictional losses over thousands of operating hours. This necessitates advanced coatings like thermal barrier ceramics, diamond-like carbon and plasma-sprayed composites, which require both sophisticated application techniques and precision control. Additionally, machining these heavy components requires large-format CNC equipment, micrometre-scale metrology systems, and ultra-tight tolerances, particularly for parts like crankshafts and cylinder blocks. India's ecosystem lacks scalable industrial integration.
Fourth, it's impossible to build next-gen marine engines when our top institutes still train students on outdated models. These belong in museums, not classrooms. With India hosting the world's largest ship-breaking yard at Alang, institutes should at least source decommissioned modern engines from there to upgrade training.
To address these gaps, India must shift its strategy from relying solely on large public- and private-sector firms, which have struggled to deliver full-stack indigenous marine engines, and instead invest in a new generation of tech start-ups. Startups can bring agility, risk-taking and cross-disciplinary innovation.
The government should facilitate this through targeted innovation missions, design-linked incentives, and dedicated funding for marine propulsion R&D, backed by defence and shipping sector demand. Institutions like IIT Madras can serve as anchor nodes, supporting venture creation with lab-to-market pipelines. Start-ups must be supported not only with capital, but also through access to testbeds, IP support, and public procurement guarantees.
To develop large marine engines, India must build a dedicated propulsion design ecosystem. Equally critical is access to domain-specific software for 3D modelling and mechanical design; combustion and thermodynamic simulation; structural and thermal stress analysis; and embedded control system development.
India has made visible strides in other areas of shipbuilding. New yards are coming up, older ones are being modernised, and maritime ambitions are growing. But without the ability to build our own marine engines, we are laying the keel for dependency. Just as the Tejas fighter still flies on imported engines, our ships risk sailing under the shadow of foreign dependency. A vessel may be built in India, flagged in India, and crewed by Indians, but unless we build the engine, we will never truly steer our own course.
Sanyal is member, EAC-PM and Sinha is a writer on state capacity, economic policy, and institutional reform.
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