INS Sudarshini, the Indian Navy's sail training ship, arrived at Barcelona, Spain, on 1 September 2026, on her ongoing transoceanic expedition Lokayan 26. During the halt she is to conduct professional and cultural engagements with the Spanish Navy, her embarked sea trainees taking part in seamanship exchanges, and the ship was to be open to visitors on 4 September 2026.
A sailing ship in a modern navy invites an obvious question: why does a service that operates nuclear submarines and carrier aircraft still send officers to sea under canvas?
The answer is the substance of this topic.
What a sail training ship is for
A warship insulates its crew from the sea. Engines make speed independent of wind; radar and satellite navigation make position independent of judgement; damage control and stabilisation make the hull feel like a building.
A sailing ship removes all of that. Under sail, the ship goes where the wind and the crew's competence allow. Trainees must read weather, handle rigging at height in bad conditions, work as a team on lines where one person's error is instantly everyone's problem, and navigate with an awareness of set and drift that an engine ordinarily hides.
That is why sail training survives in almost every serious navy in the world. It is character and seamanship training, not transport — and the phrase to remember is that it builds sea sense: an intuitive feel for the medium a sailor will spend a career on.
The Indian Navy's sailing fleet
| Vessel | Role |
|---|---|
| INS Tarangini | Sail training ship; the Navy's first, commissioned in 1997 |
| INS Sudarshini | Sail training ship, commissioned in 2012 |
| INSV Mhadei and INSV Tarini | Sailing vessels used for long-distance and circumnavigation expeditions |
Both Tarangini and Sudarshini were built at Goa Shipyard Limited, one of the Defence Public Sector Undertakings, and both are three-masted barques attached to the First Training Squadron, based at Kochi.
Note the prefix carefully. INS denotes a commissioned Indian Naval Ship; INSV denotes an Indian Naval Sailing Vessel. Tarini and Mhadei are the vessels associated with India's circumnavigation expeditions, including the all-women Navika Sagar Parikrama voyages. Sudarshini and Tarangini are the training ships; the two sets are frequently interchanged in options and should not be.
The command structure behind it
The First Training Squadron sits under the command that owns training.
| Command | Headquarters | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Western Naval Command | Mumbai | Operational — Arabian Sea |
| Eastern Naval Command | Visakhapatnam | Operational — Bay of Bengal |
| Southern Naval Command | Kochi | Training |
Add to these the Andaman and Nicobar Command at Port Blair, which is India's only tri-service theatre command, established in 2001, and headed by a Commander-in-Chief drawn in rotation from the three services. That fourth entry is asked more often than any of the first three, precisely because it is the exception.
Naval diplomacy, stated plainly
The expedition's stated purpose — engagements with the Spanish Navy, an open ship day for the public — is naval diplomacy, and it has a specific logic worth articulating in an interview.
A warship is a piece of sovereign territory that can be moved. When it enters a foreign port, it carries the flag, the service and the country into a place where ordinary diplomacy has limited reach — and it does so without any of the friction that basing troops abroad would create. Presence is the message. A training ship makes the message softer still: it arrives with cadets rather than missiles, and it can be visited by the public.
This sits inside India's broader maritime framing of SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region, articulated in 2015, which positions India as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region and was widened in 2025 into the MAHASAGAR formulation extending the same idea across regions.
The Barcelona call also carries a plainer point about reach. Spain is on the Mediterranean, far outside the Indian Ocean Region, and a sail training ship reaching it under an expedition named Lokayan — a voyage of the world — is itself the argument being made: that the Indian Navy trains and operates at oceanic distances, not merely in its own neighbourhood.
Where this sits in an officer's training
For an NDA aspirant the useful question is where a voyage like this falls in a career, because the answer describes the whole pipeline.
A cadet entering through the National Defence Academy at Khadakwasla spends three years there in a tri-service environment before service-specific training. Naval cadets then move to the Indian Naval Academy at Ezhimala in Kerala — the largest naval academy in Asia, commissioned in 2009 — for the remainder of their pre-commission training.
What follows commissioning is the part that matters here. Young officers go to sea for afloat training, and the First Training Squadron exists to provide it: a formation of training ships, including the two sail training ships, whose whole purpose is to take officers under training to sea rather than to fight. Sudarshini's trainees at Barcelona are described in the release as "sea trainees" for exactly this reason — they are on the afloat leg, not on an operational deployment.
So the sequence to remember is academy, then afloat training, then the fleet. A long expedition under sail is not a detour from that sequence; it is the middle step being done properly, and the foreign port calls are a by-product of routing a slow ship across an ocean.
🔑 Revision block
- INS Sudarshini, the Navy's sail training ship, reached Barcelona, Spain, on 1 September 2026 during expedition Lokayan 26; open to visitors 4 September 2026.
- Sail training ships: INS Tarangini (1997, the first) and INS Sudarshini (2012) — both three-masted barques built at Goa Shipyard Limited, both in the First Training Squadron at Kochi.
- INSV Tarini and INSV Mhadei are sailing vessels used for circumnavigation expeditions — not the training ships. INS = commissioned ship; INSV = naval sailing vessel.
- Naval commands: Western — Mumbai, Eastern — Visakhapatnam, Southern — Kochi (training).
- Andaman and Nicobar Command, Port Blair, 2001 — India's only tri-service theatre command.
- Purpose of sail training: seamanship, weather sense, teamwork and sea sense, not transport.
- Officer pipeline: NDA Khadakwasla → Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimala (2009, Asia's largest) → afloat training with the First Training Squadron → the fleet.
- SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region (2015); India as a net security provider; widened in 2025 as MAHASAGAR.
🎯 Practice MCQs
Q1. INS Sudarshini is a: (a) survey vessel (b) sail training ship (c) offshore patrol vessel (d) landing ship → (b).
Q2. The Indian Navy's first sail training ship was: (a) INS Sudarshini (b) INSV Tarini (c) INS Tarangini (d) INSV Mhadei → (c), commissioned in 1997.
Q3. The Southern Naval Command is headquartered at: (a) Mumbai (b) Visakhapatnam (c) Kochi (d) Port Blair → (c) — the training command.
Q4. The Eastern Naval Command is headquartered at: (a) Chennai (b) Visakhapatnam (c) Kolkata (d) Paradip → (b).
Q5. India's only tri-service theatre command is at: (a) Kochi (b) Port Blair (c) Mumbai (d) Karwar → (b) — the Andaman and Nicobar Command, from 2001.
Q6. INS Sudarshini and INS Tarangini were built at: (a) Mazagon Dock (b) Goa Shipyard Limited (c) Garden Reach Shipbuilders (d) Cochin Shipyard → (b).
Q7. The prefix INSV denotes: (a) a submarine (b) a survey ship (c) a naval sailing vessel (d) a support vessel → (c) — as in INSV Tarini.
Q8. Expedition Lokayan 26 brought INS Sudarshini to which port on 1 September 2026? (a) Lisbon (b) Barcelona (c) Marseille (d) Naples → (b).
Q9. SAGAR, articulated in 2015, stands for: (a) Strategic Alliance for Growth and Regional Access (b) Security and Growth for All in the Region (c) Sagarmala Growth and Regional Access (d) Secure Access to Global Areas and Routes → (b).
Q10. The primary purpose of sail training in a modern navy is: (a) cost saving (b) coastal patrol (c) seamanship, weather sense and teamwork (d) ceremonial duty → (c).
Q11. Which vessel is associated with India's all-women circumnavigation voyages? (a) INS Sudarshini (b) INS Tarangini (c) INSV Tarini (d) INS Shardul → (c).
Q12. The Western Naval Command is responsible principally for the: (a) Bay of Bengal (b) Arabian Sea (c) Andaman Sea (d) Palk Strait → (b).
📋 How this gets asked (PYQ pattern)
Naval questions run in four shapes. The command item — three commands matched to Mumbai, Visakhapatnam and Kochi, with the Andaman and Nicobar tri-service command as the fourth and the discriminator. The prefix item — INS against INSV, and which vessel did which voyage; Tarini and Sudarshini are the pair most often swapped. The shipyard item — which DPSU built which class, with Goa Shipyard, Mazagon Dock, GRSE and Hindustan Shipyard offered together. The expedition item — the name of the current voyage and its ports of call.
The fresh 2026 hook is Lokayan 26 and the Barcelona call, which is likeliest as a one-line identification paired with "sail training ship". A statement pair combining the ship's role with the Kochi training command is the most probable item. As always, we describe the recurring pattern, not any exact past question.
Preparing for the NDA? Naval questions reward one map and one table — commands with their cities, and ships with their prefixes and builders. Build the base with our NDA general knowledge notes and notes on transport and connectivity, follow the daily NDA current affairs, and train with our ex-officer faculty in the upcoming Cavalier courses in Delhi.
✍️ Written by Maj Sunil Chopra — Defence studies faculty at The Cavalier. Reviewed by the Cavalier Faculty Desk. The Cavalier, founded by ex-Army officers, has trained NDA/CDS/SSB aspirants since 2001 (Facebook · YouTube).
Source: PIB / Ministry of Defence, 2 September 2026. Naval organisation and vessel details cross-verified with independent sources.