New Delhi, July 24 - The Indian Navy's acquisition of Russian-built aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov is facing yet another controversy as the accouting watchdog, the Comptroller and Audit General (CAG), Friday revealed that the 'second-hand' warhorse will be 60 percent costlier than a new one and there is a risk of further delay in its delivery.

According to the CAG report, the objective of inducting an aircraft carrier in time to fill the gap in the navy has not been achieved due to the delay in the delivery of the warship.

Also, by the time the aircraft carrier will be delivered, it is not clear how the navy with continuously depleting manpower would provide 'adequate complement battle group to the carrier'.

'The cost of acquisition has more than doubled to USD 1.82 billion in four years. At best Indian Navy would be acquiring, belatedly, a second-hand ship with a limited life span by paying significantly more than what it would have paid for a new ship,' it said in an annual report.

The purchase of Admiral Gorshkov faced controversy when Russia escalated the price for its refitting in 2007 and also pushed back its delivery date.

According to the CAG report, the platform is scheduled to be delivered by 2012 and would be due for its second refit in India by 2017.

Moreover, the report predicts that the Russian shipyard might as well fail to stick to the revised scheduled delivery date.

'Overall work progress continued to be slow and needed to be accelerated to meet even the revised scheduled. Given the work needed to be done, preceeding the undocking and the cascading effect of delay in undocking on downstream activities, there was a risk that the delivery acceptance trials of the ship would not be completed by 2012,' the report said.

'It can be seen that Indian Navy was acquiring a second-hand refitted aircraft carrier that had half the life span of and was 60 percent more expensive that a new one,' it said.