Around 200 men have been engaged for breaking the iconic warship and the work is expected to be completed in seven to eight months.
Three months after the Supreme Court junked a PIL
against scrapping of the country’s first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant, the
process of breaking the iconic naval vessel has begun.
“We began the process of breaking INS Vikrant
yesterday and it will take at least seven to eight months to complete the job,”
Abdul Zaka of ship breaking company IB Commercial (IBC), which had won the bid
for the decommissioned ship for Rs. 60 crore, said.
Zaka said that after the Supreme Court in August
rejected the PIL to convert the ship into a maritime museum, IBC obtained
mandatory permissions from different government authorities for dismantling it
at a ship breaking yard at Darukana in south Mumbai.
Around 200 men have been engaged for the job.
Before the Supreme Court’s verdict, the Maharashtra
Government had expressed its inability to maintain the vessel inducted into the
Navy in 1961 and decommissioned in January 1997.
In January 2014, during the hearing of a Public
Interest Litigation that opposed the plan to scrap the ship, the Defence
Ministry had told the Bombay High Court that it had completed its operational
life.
Responding to the demand for converting it into a
museum, Maharashtra government had expressed its inability to preserve it as a
museum, saying it would not be financially viable.
The High Court had subsequently dismissed the PIL.
The Majestic—class aircraft carrier, purchased from
Britain in 1957, played a key role in enforcing the naval blockade of East
Pakistan during the Indo—Pakistan war of 1971 which culminated in creation of
Bangladesh.
Defence sources said more than 60 per cent of the
artefacts on the ship have been moved to the Maritime History Society in
Mumbai, while rest shifted to Naval Aviation Museum in Goa. The remaining relics
will be shifted to various museums and motivational centres.
Source: the hindu. 21 November 2014
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