India inks pacts to secure ships beyond its seas

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India inks pacts to secure ships beyond its seas
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NEW DELHI: India is steadily stitching up "white shipping" pacts with different countries for reciprocal exchange of information on merchant vessels to bolster its maritime domain awareness (MDA) and tackle threats emanating from the sea.
"Of the 29 countries and three multi-national const three multi-national constructs identified for the purpose, white shipping agreements have already been inked with 10-11 till now. The main focus is on our primary area of geopolitical interest stretching from Africa's east coast to beyond the Malacca Strait," said a defence ministry source.
India, sitting astride several busy shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) as it does, needs to develop "a holistic operational picture" of the seas around it to ensure it can detect, track and tackle both conventional and unconventional threats.
But while Navy, Coast Guard and other agencies try to keep track of "grey" (foreign warships) and "black" (illegal) ships through warships, patrol aircraft, drones, satellites and the like, the number of "white" or commercial ships is simply too large to be effectively monitored. As per one estimate, there are over one lakh large merchant vessels around the globe. This is where the "white shipping" pacts come into play, with countries exchanging AIS (automatic identification system) transponder data and other information on cargo vessels to mutually enhance their MDA.
"No one country can keep the vast areas on the high seas under surveillance...some of the gaps can be plugged through such pacts to share real-time positional information. It can help in detection of threats away from our shores, providing us with enough reaction time to neutralise them," said the source. Apart from countries like Japan and the US, India has gone in for such white shipping pacts with countries astride what it considers "choke-points" in the Indian Ocean Region.
In November last year, for instance, India finalized the sharing of commercial shipping information with Singapore and Malaysia during PM Narendra Modi's visit to these countries next to the Malacca Strait and other crucial shipping lanes.
Concurrently, India has also taken steps to develop its MDA by helping in setting up coastal surveillance radar stations (CSRS) in strategically-located IOR countries like Mauritius, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and Maldives.
During his visit to Seychelles in March 2015, PM Modi commissioned the first of the eight CSRS being erected in the country , each with navigation radars, electrooptic sensors and AIS transponders. "Similarly , Maldives is being assisted to set up 10 CSRS," said the source.
India is yet to give concrete shape to its complex national MDA project, envisaged after the 2611 terror strikes in Mumbai, but other structures linked to it have come up. The central hub of the National Command Control Communication Intelligence (NC3I) network, the Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) at Gurgaon, for instance, was commissioned in 2014.
Taking feedsfrom multiple sources ranging from coastal radars to satellites, which are fused, correlated and analysed, the IMAC can track around 30,000-40,000 ships on a daily basis.
 

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I will find out and will post further details over it later on this thread.
 

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