The Ministry of Defence has decided not to appoint a deputy director general for the National Institute for Research and Development in Defence Shipbuilding (Nirdesh) at Chaliyam in Kozhikode district, giving an impression that the project may be wound up soon.
The extended tenure of incumbent deputy director D.C. Agarwal will come to an end on Saturday. Dr. Agarwal, a scientist, was appointed as a consultant in July 2014 to vitalise and operationalise Nirdesh for five years. Then he was given a six-month extension.
The development comes on the heels of the Ministry of Defence appointing an officer on special duty, V.K. Surendran, who retired from the Mazagon Dock Limited after its project director Captain B. Ramesh Babu was repatriated to his parent organisation in August 2019.
Thus the project will not have a deputy director general as well as a project director.
Official sources say Nirdesh, functioning directly under the Department of Defence Production, has been going through a rough patch at some point or another since former Defence Minister A.K. Antony laid the foundation stone for the project in January 2011.
The five-and-a-half-year tenure of Dr. Agarwal, official sources say, itself has taken a lot of heat, including his setting up of an office in Delhi. He visited Kozhikode only on four occasions, 10 days all these years.
Stay in Delhi
One of the reasons he has remained in the national capital is that he would sort out issues for getting approval and financial support from the Centre. Incidentally, training programmes imparted for multiple agencies came to an abrupt end in 2017. Four research and development projects incurring an expenditure of ₹50 lakh — three at the Indian Institutes of Technologies at Guwahati and Kanpur and one at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru — have yielded no results.
The original proposal of Nirdesh was to set up a world-class ship designing institute at a cost of ₹600 crore. However, the much-touted project for Kozhikode city has reached nowhere till now.
Funds released via Mazagon Dock Limited, Goa Shipyard Limited, Hindustan Shipyard Limited, and Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Limited have sustained the project.
Even as the fate of the project is hanging fire, the State government has planned to recover the land for expansion of the Beypore port.
Unfazed by local-level protests, the government had acquired 40 acres for Nirdesh a decade ago. It was then said that the project would not only generate employment but also stimulate growth in the city.
