INS Nireekshak Joins Sri Lanka for 4th India-Sri Lanka Diving Exercise

INS Nireekshak, the Indian Navy's specialised diving support vessel, arrived at Colombo on 23 April 2026 to take part in the 4th edition of the India-Sri Lanka Diving Exercise, IN-SLN DIVEX 2026. The exercise has been a feature of the bilateral defence calendar since 2017 and rotates between Indian and Sri Lankan ports.

This year's drills focus on advanced underwater operations: harbour and open-sea diving, search-and-rescue procedures, salvage techniques, mine-countermeasure familiarisation, and joint medical-evacuation routines. Officers from the two navies are also conducting professional exchanges on diving medicine, decompression chamber protocols, and damage control. Combined sea-phase exercises are planned along the Sri Lankan coast.

For New Delhi, the exercise sits inside two policy frames. The first is the long-standing "Neighbourhood First" policy, which prioritises capacity-building partnerships with immediate maritime neighbours. The second is the SAGAR doctrine — Security and Growth for All in the Region — which India recently expanded into the broader MAHASAGAR vision for the Indian Ocean Region. As part of the visit, India also handed over two BHISHM medical cube units to Sri Lanka. The portable BHISHM cube, developed under Project Aarogya Maitri, is a self-contained emergency-response unit designed to provide trauma care for up to 200 casualties.

Sri Lanka holds strategic value because of its position astride busy Indian Ocean shipping lanes and its proximity to ports such as Hambantota. India's deeper diving and salvage cooperation is, in effect, an interoperability investment — a way for the two navies to be able to work together quickly during a search-and-rescue, oil-spill, or downed-aircraft event.

Exam angle: SAGAR doctrine, MAHASAGAR vision, Neighbourhood First policy, joint exercises (look up the wider list including SLINEX, Mitra Shakti), Project Aarogya Maitri, and India-Sri Lanka maritime cooperation are common UPSC GS-II IR and defence-exam topics.