Nation stays under radar with sub

India's first locally designed nuclear-powered submarine is due for a quiet launch shortly before the country's August 15 Independence Day celebrations, nearly three decades after the highly secretive programme was initiated.

Official sources said the 6000-tonne submarine, codenamed the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) would be lowered into the Bay of Bengal at Visakhapatnam on the east coast where it has been under construction at a tightly guarded naval facility.

The launch is expected to be without fanfare and even Defence Minister AK Antony is unlikely to attend.

After being launched - during which all systems would be activated - the submarine would undergo harbour and then sea trials in 12-18 months.

Under development since India's first nuclear test in 1974, the ATV is expected to be christened and commissioned into the Indian Navy at the end of 2010 or early in 2011.

Based on a design provided by India's ally and principal weapon supplier, Russia, the ATV forms the crucial third leg of India's strategic nuclear deterrence that includes a triad of weapons deliverable by air, mobile, land and sea-based platforms.

It is eventually to be armed with locally designed Sagarika (Oceanic) two-stage missiles that the state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation claims to have successfully tested twice.

"The ATV's launch will be the first milestone on the boats' long remaining journey," said a former Navy official associated with the SSN project, which the Navy denied even existed until December 2007.

A lot of work remains to be done before its systems are validated and it is declared operational, he said.

Navy sources said the ATV was the first of three nuclear submarines accorded "in principal" clearance by the Navy. Directly under the Prime Minister's supervision from its inception, the ATV project has been developed jointly by the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Department of Atomic Energy, the Navy, and Larsen & Toubro, a private Mumbai-based defence contractor.

The programme gained momentum after India leased a Soviet Charlie-I class vessel - christened INS Chakra (Wheel) - for three years until 1991 to gain operational experience with nuclear submarines.

Plans to lease additional submarines were quashed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The ATVs 100-member crew has undergone training in a locally developed simulator and at the School for Advanced Underwater Warfare, also at Visakhapatnam.

Operational training is being provided on the Russian Akula-class nuclear submarine, which the Navy has leased for US$600 million ($926.3 million) to US$700 million as part of a secret agreement with Russia 4.

"We will lease only one submarine [to India]," Russian Information Agency Novosti quoted deputy head of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Co-operation, Vyacheslav Dzirkaln, as saying recently.

Dzirkaln said the transfer of the nuclear submarine, which suffered a fatal accident during trials in the Sea of Japan in November 2008 in which 20 sailors and technicians died, would be delivered to the Indian Navy by the end of the year.

Leasing the Akula would make India the world's sixth nation after Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States to operate a nuclear submarine.

International treaties forbid the sale of nuclear submarines, but not leases provided the boats are not equipped with missiles with ranges of over 300km.