The Indian Navy faces a formidable security challenge in defending its coastline, island territories, and Exclusive Economic Zone. India’s seaboard-based fleets are excellent at responding quickly to hostile naval presence on the high seas or in the littoral regions, but there is also a need to project maritime deterrence.India has been working to improve its naval power, with a focus on the Indian Ocean, because it is worried about China’s growing presence in the area, which is considered the Indian Navy’s backyard. Furthermore, because both China and Pakistan have stealth ships (the latter acquired from China), it is incumbent on the Indian Navy to pursue and incorporate stealth technology in its warships as an effective counter-measure.A destroyer is a fast, manoeuvrable, and long-lasting warship that is used to protect larger ships in a fleet, convoy, or battle group from powerful short-range attacks and it employs stealth technology construction techniques in an effort to ensure that it is harder to detect by one or more of radar, visual, sonar, and infrared methods.Stealth ship technology accomplishes precisely this goal by allowing the stealth ships to bring their lethality to bear on an adversary’s coastal or naval assets while significantly reducing the adversary’s window of detection and counter-actionINS MormugaoOn Sunday, the Indian Navy inducted the indigenously built missile destroyer ‘INS Mormugao’ to strengthen its maritime capability in the face of China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean region. INS Mormugao is the second ship built under Project 15B in the Indian Navy’s Visakhapatnam-class stealth guided-missile destroyersThe vessel is made up of 75% indigenous content and is outfitted with a plethora of indigenous equipment and major indigenous weapons. A total of four ships are being developed under this project. They will be put into operation in Visakhapatnam, Mormugao, Imphal, and Surat. The first vessel in the project, INS Visakhapatnam, was commissioned into the Indian Navy in November 2021. It is the lead ship and the first of the Visakhapatnam-class stealth guided-missile destroyers of the Indian Navy.