Incidentally, the Russian origin carrier, which has been renamed as the ‘Shilang’, has been transferred to the Dalian Naval Academy and is being fitted with a Chinese power plant. The Indian Navy believes that the carrier will never be able to function as a full fledged warship but will be used to carry out basic landing and take off practice.

While China is fast moving towards acquiring an aircraft carrier, analysts say that it could take nearly two decades ¿ the time required to train crews and fine tune operations aboard warships of this size - to have a fully operational fleet.

The US also estimates that China is capable of starting construction of an indigenous aircraft carrier by the end of the decade. The latest Pentagon report on the Chinese military, however, says that the country ‘could not have an operational, domestically-produced aircarft carrier before 2015’.