Chinese shipyards can outproduce Indian ones on raw tonnage. They cannot replicate this map. Still, a favorable map is worthless without ships in the water to make use of it — and that's the gap this piece is about.
Geography gave India something China cannot buy: a coastline that juts 1,600 km into open water, positioned directly across the shipping lanes that run from the Gulf to East Asia. That coastline now measures close to 11,100 km on official maps — up from the long-used 7,500 km figure, not because the land moved but because the Survey of India recalculated it more precisely in 2025. Add in 1,382 islands and an exclusive economic zone of roughly 2.37 million sq km, and a picture emerges: this is not a country sitting near the world's trade routes, it's a country the trade routes have to sail past. Ships bound for East Asia come within reach of Indian radar almost by default, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands guard the western entrance to the Malacca Strait almost by accident of location.
Chinese shipyards can outproduce Indian ones on raw tonnage. They cannot replicate this map. Still, a favorable map is worthless without ships in the water to make use of it — and that's the gap this piece is about.
The Sea Carries the Economy
Sea lanes move over 90% of India's trade by volume and more than 85% of its crude oil supply. Four choke corridors do most of the work: Hormuz, the Red Sea–Suez passage, Malacca, and Bab el-Mandeb. Before this year's disruption, something like 40 to 45% of India's crude, along with half its LNG and nine-tenths of its LPG, moved through Hormuz alone. Malacca carries a different mix — India isn't as dependent on it for oil as China is — but pharmaceutical ingredients, electronics, industrial inputs, and coal shipments from Australia and Indonesia all pass through it regardless. Block any one of these four gates and the effects show up in Indian refineries and factories within a matter of weeks, not months.
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Surveying First, Sailing Later
What should worry planners isn't a Chinese carrier battle group steaming into the region next year — it's something quieter and harder to point to: a presence so constant that it stops registering as unusual. Roughly 64 Chinese survey and research vessels are active in these waters right now, and about 80% of them have documented links to the People's Liberation Army. Thirteen or more have already mapped the ocean floor in fine detail — exactly the kind of hydrographic data submarines need before they can operate safely in unfamiliar waters. Layer onto that a ring of ports Beijing has helped build or finance — Djibouti, Gwadar, Hambantota, Kyaukpyu — arranged conveniently around India's maritime rim, and a pattern becomes hard to miss: the infrastructure goes in years before the warships ever need to use it.
Submarines Next Door, Threats From the Water
Pakistan's naval doctrine leans on denial rather than dominance — submarines, anti-ship missiles, a sea-based nuclear deterrent, much of it built with Chinese assistance. April 2026 saw the commissioning of the first Hangor-class attack submarine, the opening delivery in a planned run of eight; four of those eight are being assembled in Karachi itself.
Not every maritime threat wears a uniform, though. Gunmen reached Mumbai by boat in November 2008, and that lesson hasn't expired. This year brought a fresh reminder from a different direction: Houthi forces have begun targeting Indian shipping interests outright, and in early August 2026 a projectile struck the Indian-flagged vessel MSV Faize Noore Oliya off the Yemeni coast, sinking it. All fourteen crew — thirteen of them Indian nationals — survived and were pulled to safety. Indian naval escorts began shepherding crude tankers through Bab el-Mandeb within days of that strike, and today Indian ships hold position at multiple Gulf chokepoints at once, not just one.
Hormuz Showed How Cheaply a Strait Can Die
Of everything that's happened this year, nothing rewrote the strategic playbook quite like Hormuz. Iranian forces announced the strait closed in late February 2026, and traffic across it essentially stopped — hundreds of ships and their crews found themselves stuck inside the Gulf with nowhere to go. The price of India's crude basket tracked the crisis almost exactly: roughly $69 a barrel in February, north of $110 by mid-March, with spikes well above that at the peak.
No carrier group made this happen. Iran did it with missiles, drones, sea mines, and the simple fact of owning the coastline. That should retire an assumption a lot of navies have quietly relied on — that shutting a major artery requires blue-water muscle. It doesn't, apparently. A country with modest naval reach can choke off a global chokepoint on a shoestring budget, and hold it shut for the better part of a season.
Carriers Aren't the Extravagance Critics Claim
There's a familiar complaint that aircraft carriers are costly, easy to target, and not worth the money. It's a fair-sounding argument that misses what carriers are actually built to solve: distance.
Mumbai sits some 1,500 nautical miles from Hormuz. Bab el-Mandeb is further out still. No land-based squadron can hold station over those waters week after week — fuel and range won't allow it. A carrier group solves that problem by bringing its own runway, its own air-defense bubble, and its own command structure out to wherever the tankers actually are. That's the entire case for keeping one, or several, at sea.
The unglamorous half of the equation is escort duty, and it's a matter of headcount more than firepower. Frigates, destroyers, corvettes, and fleet tankers handle it — running convoys, boarding suspicious vessels, and simply staying visible long enough to deter trouble before it starts.
Blueprints Are Ready; Steel Isn't
Right now India fields two carriers — INS Vikramaditya and INS Vikrant — and one of them is routinely out of service for refit. On an unlucky day, that leaves exactly one carrier available for the entire Indian Ocean.
The Navy's own target is a 175-to-200-ship fleet by 2035; current strength sits somewhere in the 130-to-150 range, with more than fifty additional hulls already under construction. But IAC-2, the second carrier built domestically, is still stuck waiting for final sign-off from the government — ten years after the money for its design was first released. That gap matters because of timing: a warship takes roughly a decade from order to commissioning, while a crisis, as Hormuz proved, can materialize inside a week.
The old idea of the Indian Ocean as a natural buffer, a moat keeping trouble at bay, no longer holds. It's a lifeline now, and rival powers keep testing where it might snap.
This month's tankers made it through Bab el-Mandeb intact because Indian warships were already positioned to escort them. No guarantee holds next month — it could just as easily be four unescorted cargo ships and nothing standing between them and the missiles. Warships ordered today won't be ready until sometime in the 2030s, which leaves exactly one sensible option: place the order now.
Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He is pursuing a PhD in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views or stance of the organization. The organization assumes no responsibility for the content shared.
