Breaching barriers: Navy to deploy more women on warships

NEW DELHI: The Indian Navy is going ahead with a plan to give women officers more opportunities to serve aboard warships, with several women already assigned to front-line ships operating in the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), navy officials familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The count of women serving aboard warships has gone up from four earlier this year to 28 as of December, as a result of the navy sharpening its focus on the plan, said one of these officials. The navy deployed four women officers on warships in early 2021 after almost 25 years, opening more roles to them. “The number of women on warship duties is steadily increasing. We are looking at deploying two to three women officers on every warship. Currently, 28 women are serving aboard around 15 warships,” said a second senior officer. The women are serving as pilots, observers, logistics officers and doctors.

Excluding the medical wing, in which women have served for decades, the navy accounted for more than 700 women officers who formed 6.5% of its overall officer cadre as of March 2021.

Submarines, however, are still off limits to women.

In early 2021, India’s only aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya and fleet tanker INS Shakti became the navy’s first warships to be assigned women crewmembers (two each) since the late 1990s. In a short-lived experiment, women from logistics and medical branches were deployed on fleet tanker INS Jyoti in 1997.

Navy chief Admiral R Hari Kumar on Friday said the navy was taking initiatives to give women more opportunities in line with the government’s objective to empower them.

“They have been appointed on board almost all major warships. Induction of women officers into the information technology branch will commence in June 2022,” Kumar said at his annual briefing on the eve of Navy Day.

“The women who join the navy are of very high calibre and they have been performing on par with male counterparts. Sometimes even better,” he said.

The modalities for downstream training of women cadets at the National Defence Academy (NDA) were being worked out, and the navy was prepared to induct women across a spectrum of roles and responsibilities.

A third of the over 500,000 candidates who took the NDA examination last month were women, after the apex court forced the government to open the doors to them.