• Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu inaugurated the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL) in Kochi. 

• Naidu laid the foundation stone of the ‘Towed Array Integration Facility’, essential for the development of towed array sonar systems, which is critical to underwater defence. The towed array sonar system is expected to enhance the Navy’s capabilities to detect quieter enemy submarines underwater.

• Naidu also inaugurated the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam memorial at the NPOL premises.

Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL)

• Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL), Kochi is one of the major R&D laboratories of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

• NPOL is engaged in the development of Sound Navigation And Ranging (SONAR) and allied technologies. 

• The thrust areas of R&D of the NPOL are signal processing, electronics, engineering systems, transducers, materials and oceanography.

• It was set up in 1952 as an in-house laboratory of the Indian Navy, then called Indian Naval Physical Laboratory (INPL), for providing scientific support to the armed services. 

• Later it was re-christened as NPOL after the formation of DRDO under the ministry of defence in 1958. 

• NPOL/DRDO owns a marine acoustic research vessel named INS Sagardhwani. It was indigenously built at M/s Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Limited (GRSE), Calcutta and commissioned in 1994. The vessel is run and maintained by the Indian Navy for DRDO and based at Southern Naval Command, Kochi.

• This ship has got many special facilities for conducting underwater ocean environmental and acoustic experiments both in shallow and deep waters. State-of-the-art equipment is fitted onboard in order to pursue research in Anti-submarine Warfare (ASW) oceanography and acoustics. 

• The ship’s laboratories house all relevant scientific equipment to make high resolution oceanographic and acoustics measurements at the sea. The ship can moor oceanographic and acoustic buoys in shallow and deep waters.

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