INS Betwa mishap: Sailor's remains cremated, professional salvers arrive to rescue the frigate

Teams of professionals are assisting the Indian Navy salvage INS Betwa, a naval frigate that tipped over at the Mumbai docks while it was being undocked on Monday. According to The Asian Age report , “Teams of professional salvers, including from abroad, have reached the accident site to assess the damage with more teams expected to arrive later.” The Navy said that it’s determined to salvage the frigate and make it fighting-fit by 2018. “Come what may, INS Betwa will be salvaged. The Indian Navy is looking at first to make the flipped ship stand upright, then to assess the damage and to undertake salvage operations and finally to make it battle-ready by 2018. Every equipment that the ship had can be made indigenously,” Indian Navy spokesperson Captain DK Sharma told the newspaper. [caption id=“attachment_3143540” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The frigate INS Betwa lies on its side. PTI[/caption] According to a report in Free Press Journal , the team is expected to complete its initial assessment within a couple of days on the extent of damage the battleship has suffered and chalk out plans to make the 126-metre frigate upright. INS Betwa, a Brahmaputra-class guided missile warship (F-39), slipped on the dock blocks during a refit at about 1.50 pm on Monday. Weighing around 3,850-tonne, with a length of 126 metres, the ship fell sideways while it was being undocked for return to water thus breaking the main mast of the frigate. The accident claimed two lives  and injured 15 others. Mortal remains of sailors consigned to flames The mortal remains of sailor Ashutosh Pande, who lost his life in the mishap were consigned to flames with full military honours at his hometown in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh. His body was brought by a Navy plane to Dhana airstrip near here and then was taken to his home in Sadbhavna Nagar in a military vehicle for the last rites. His kin and a large number of people were present for the cremation which took place on the 10th Battalion cremation ground on Wednesday. However, reportedly no senior official from the district administration attended the cremation. A “miscalculation of balance” Meanwhile, Defence Minister, Manohar Parrikar has called the incident a “miscalculation of balance”. Parrikar explained that when a ship undergoes refit, a lot of machines and fixtures like propeller, engine, etc are removed due to which the balance gets disturbed. “You are supposed to maintain it. Something must have gone wrong in that,” he said on Wednesday while responding to a question as to whether the INS Betwa accident showed Navy’s inability to absorb high technology. He also said that a Board of Inquiry is on and it will pinpoint the reasons. The Board of Inquiry, formed on Tuesday, is headed by rear Admiral Deepak Bali and Flag-Officer Offshore Defence Advisory Group. The ship had run aground in January 2014 and collided with an unidentified object which led to a crack in its sonar system, and had also seen salt water ingress into sensitive equipment. Named after the river Betwa, the frigate has been in service for over 12 years. It was indigenously designed and built with the capability to operate at extended ranges, with speeds up to 30 knots. It is one of the key warships of the Western Naval Command. It is armed with Uran anti-ship missiles, Barak 1 surface-to-air missiles and torpedoes. With input from agencies