Three vessels of the Indian Navy’s First Training Squadron are due at the Port of Colombo on Monday 26 October for a three-day goodwill visit, with five Sri Lanka Navy officer trainees already sailing as part of the squadron’s long-range deployment, the Daily Mirror reported on Sunday evening.
The squadron comprises the Indian Naval Ships Tir and Sujata and the Indian Coast Guard Ship Sarathi. It will remain in Colombo until 28 October.
What the squadron is for
The First Training Squadron — 1TS — is the Indian Navy’s seagoing school. Its standing task is to give initial sea training to officer trainees of the Indian Navy, the Indian Coast Guard and friendly foreign navies, which is what places Sri Lankan cadets aboard.
It is commanded by Captain Tijo K Joseph, Senior Officer of the First Training Squadron and commanding officer of INS Tir.
Colombo is one stop on a longer circuit. The deployment also takes the squadron to Port Victoria in Seychelles and Malé in the Maldives before it returns to its base port at Kochi — a three-country Indian Ocean training run rather than a bilateral port call.
The reciprocal element is the substance of it
The detail that distinguishes this visit from a courtesy call is that the training runs in both directions.
Five Sri Lanka Navy officer trainees are participating in the long-range deployment — that is, they are at sea with the squadron, not receiving it. During the Colombo stop, Indian and Sri Lankan naval officer cadets will take part in professional, training and sporting activities together, and cross-visits are planned in both directions: Indian cadets will travel to the Naval and Maritime Academy in Trincomalee, and Sri Lankan cadets will go aboard the training ships.
The visit follows that of INS Tarangini, also a First Training Squadron vessel, which came to Sri Lanka in March 2026 to provide ocean-sailing training and practical experience to officer trainees of the Naval and Maritime Academy.
Who meets whom
Rear Admiral Rohan Joseph, Director General Training of the Sri Lanka Navy, is to visit the ships on arrival at Colombo Port and meet the commanding officers, training officers and trainees on board. (He is a separate officer from the squadron’s Indian commander, Captain Tijo K Joseph, despite the shared surname.)
The Senior Officer of 1TS and the commanding officers of the visiting vessels are also scheduled to call on Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha and on Rear Admiral Harsha De Silva, Commander Western Naval Area of the Sri Lanka Navy.
A joint band performance by the Indian Navy and the Sri Lanka Navy is to be held at Galle Face Green on 27 October — the one element of the programme open to the public.
Context
The call sits inside a markedly busier year of India–Sri Lanka defence contact. Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh visited in September with maritime security on the agenda, and that visit produced three defence agreements. Sri Lanka’s naval training establishments have also hosted other partners this month, including a French ambassadorial visit to the Eastern Naval Command during a regional maritime interdiction course.
The Daily Mirror frames the visit in New Delhi’s own terms — India’s “Neighbourhood First” policy and its MAHASAGAR vision, which the filing expands as Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions.
A caution on the headline family
“Indian Navy training squadron visits Colombo” is a recurring headline. Verified outlets carry versions of it from 2011, 2015, 2016 and 2021, and INS Tir appears in more than one of them — so the ship’s name alone does not identify a visit. The 2021 deployment, for example, brought INS Tir with INS Shardul and ICGS Varuna, berthed at Trincomalee as well as Colombo, and carried about 160 Indian cadets over six days.
This visit is a different one: INS Tir with INS Sujata and ICGS Sarathi, Colombo only, 26–28 October, with five Sri Lankan trainees embarked. Readers searching for coverage should match on the consort ships and the dates, not on INS Tir.
Not reported
The filing does not give the squadron’s arrival time, the number of Indian cadets aboard, or the tonnage or class of the three vessels. It does not say whether the Trincomalee cross-visit involves the ships moving or only cadets travelling overland, and it gives no departure arrangements beyond the 28 October end date.
No other verified newsroom had filed on the visit at the time of writing. The NewsFirst homepage rail carried 19 items for 23–25 October and none on the squadron; the Colombo Gazette’s most recent post was dated 23 October; and news.lk returned no retrievable listing. Ada Derana’s pages remain unavailable from this desk, so it cannot be checked. The Indian outlets on this desk’s verified list — The Hindu, the Indian Express and NDTV — could not be searched, their domains being inaccessible to our search agent. This report is therefore single-sourced to the Daily Mirror.