Marine and defence work, Karwar

INS Kadamba, on the coast near Karwar in Karnataka, was commissioned as the Navy's third operational base, after Mumbai and Visakhapatnam, and is still being built out. It grew out of Project Seabird, an idea first put forward in the early 1980s to relieve the congestion that had built up in Mumbai harbour; the project was sanctioned in 1985 and given its foundation stone in October 1986, and the base itself was commissioned on 31 May 2005. Its first phase gave it room for eleven frontline warships, and a second phase now under way is meant to raise that to thirty two. A further phase, still only at the planning stage, has been described in press reports as making Karwar the largest naval base east of the Suez Canal, though that is not a figure the Navy or the Ministry of Defence has itself stated.

Both of the Navy's aircraft carriers, INS Vikramaditya and INS Vikrant, are homeported at Karwar as of 2024, alongside surface combatants and submarines under Western Naval Command, though the Navy has said it intends to eventually shift Vikrant's homeport to Visakhapatnam once a new carrier berth there is finished. Karwar is a base built specifically to hold a fleet this size, on open coast rather than the congested harbour approaches that constrain Mumbai, giving it room to grow that an older port cannot easily find.