India needs realistic targets to achieve its maritime goals.
The growing maritime capability of China is making India to quickly think and work towards national maritime security strategy to control China in Indian Ocean.
India needs to become a Maritime Power, BECAUSE
- Global overpowering of China: China has not only overtaken the US Navy in numbers but it is also the world’s top ship-producing nation, with the largest merchant navy, coast-guard and fishing fleet/maritime militia in the world.
- Widening Gap in maritime capabilities: China laid down its first indigenous aircraft-carrier in 2015 and commissioned it in 2018 and the work on India’s first indigenous aircraft-carrier commenced in 2009 and in 2021, the ship awaits completion.
- Poor state of India’s maritime capability: The initiation of programmes with inappropriate aims, choosing unrealistic targets, abandoning/renaming projects and not ensuring faithful implementation are the reasons underlying the dismal state of our maritime capability.
- India is lagging behind various countries: The nations which were lagging behind India a few decades ago have surged ahead because of their vision and dynamism in the vital maritime arena.
- India is tantamount to the inviolability of India’s borders: The multifarious challenges to coastal security are posed by malevolent non-State actors and State-sponsored malevolent non-State actors predominate over all others.
- The maritime border of India lies 12 nautical miles (nm), i.e., 22 kilometres, seaward of the country’s promulgated baseline.
- India is focussed upon attaining the objectives arising from a detailed analysis of the country’s principal maritime interests.
Importance of India as a Maritime Power
- Decisive role in the India-China rivalry: The naval power is going to play a decisive role because all eyes are focused seawards but the navies remain hollow without the backing of a strong maritime sector.
- Sea offers wide range of benefits for a nation: The Sea contributes significantly to the development and prosperity of nations as the scientific and technological advances coupled with the progressive implementation of new concepts of use make the seas a rich source of opportunities.
- Protection from sea-based threats to India’s territorial integrity: The preservation, promotion, pursuit and protection of offshore infrastructure and maritime resources within and beyond the Maritime Zones of India (MZI).
- The promotion, protection and safety of India’s overseas and coastal seaborne trade and her Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs), and, the ports that constitute the nodes of this trade.
- Ensuring Secure Seas: It envisages a coordinated and cooperative set of actions, in consideration of the spectrum of threats and challenges, and the key determinants and developments.
- Indian peninsula is ensconced by seas & oceans: The nation’s strategic location in the IOR and its potentials as a maritime power is a blessing for both the security of the region and the Indian economy.
- India’s role as a maritime power: It is crucial as 90 per cent of trade by volume and over 74 per cent by value takes place via sea routes.
Challenges for India in becoming Maritime Power
- China being a rival in Asia: An economically strong, expansionist, and militaristic China will use the Maritime Silk Route initiative to expand its sphere of influence and ensure dominance in the Indo-Pacific.
- Domestic confinement of maritime projects: India launched its first “maritime modernisation” plan, bearing the catchy title of “Sagarmala” in 2003 but its focus was limited to port development and road/rail connectivity.
- Lack of approach towards maritime power: The exclusive focus of successive governments on port development has led to gross neglect of other critical components of India’s maritime capability.
- It includes merchant shipping, shipbuilding, ship repair, seabed exploration and fisheries etc. all of which have implications for India’s maritime security as well as its “blue economy”.
- Tardy progress of national maritime plans: In seven years of National Maritime Development Plan (NMDP) 2005, only 82 of the 276 projects had been completed, while 30 had been dropped and 66 were still in the planning stage.
- Maritime Domain Challenges: India’s major ports are overloaded and inefficient, our shipbuilding industry is moribund, the merchant fleet is inadequate and growing at a snail’s pace, seabed exploitation has yet to take off, the fishing industry is backward, and human resources are lacking everywhere.
- Missing Industrial Underpinning: India finds itself in an anomalous situation wherein it possess nuclear weapons and boasts of the world’s 5th or 6th largest armed forces, but is forced to support their operational requirements through massive imports.
- Timely replacement of ageing platforms and obsolescent equipment: The failure of India to acquire even a reasonable level of self-reliance in major weapon systems in the past 66 years has made India the biggest importer of arms world-wide.
Measures to be adopted by India to become a Maritime Power
- Long-term approach to enhance maritime capability: It is time India evolved a National Strategy for the maritime sector that charts a 50-year path and receives Parliament’s approval to ensure survival through changes of government.
- Development of genuine intelligence-competence: It is a critical area upon which India needs to concentrate.
- The Sri Lanka Navy is the most experienced on the planet in fighting a maritime insurgency and also in innovatively maintaining high-speed Fast Attack Craft.
- Development of regional Maritime Domain Awareness: It is itself a significant facet of intelligence the execution of a capability-centric maritime strategy based upon information and its country-specific translation into intelligence.
- Creation of multi-disciplinary maritime advisory body: The first task of such a body should be to craft an overarching Maritime Security Policy and thereafter to undertake its integration with India’s Maritime Strategy.
Approach for National Strategy for Maritime Security
- Strategy for Deterrence: It is the foundational strategy for India’s defence as the prevention of conflict and coercion against India is the primary purpose of India’s armed forces.
- Strategy for Conflict: It describes the broad manner of employment of India’s maritime forces during conflict which is based on the principles of war, with application of force and focus on strategic effect as additional operational principles.
- Strategy for Shaping a Favourable and Positive Maritime Environment: It describes the ways in which the Indian Navy will contribute to shaping a favourable and positive maritime environment, to enhance net security therein.
- Strategy for Coastal and Offshore Security: It describes the ways by which the cooperative framework and coordinative mechanisms for coastal and offshore security will be strengthened and developed, against threat of sub-conventional armed attack and infiltration from the sea.
- Strategy for Maritime Force and Capability Development: It describes the ways to develop and maintain a combat ready, technology driven, network enabled navy, capable of meeting India’s maritime security needs into the future.
Road ahead
- The governance of the Indo-Pacific region should be partnership based rather than dominance based, to ensure creating mutual prosperity in a free and open Indo-Pacific.
- The sustainability concern is critical to adhere to the challenge of climate change and ensure good order at sea for the global sea boundary.
- The maritime security lies in the mind, and needs to be dealt with on a cognitive plane as India need to remind itself of its basic purpose and the fact that sustenance of a powerful and expensive navy requires the support of a sound industrial base.
- It is necessary for India’s decision-makers to appreciate that maritime security must be viewed in a holistic manner.
- The Asian countries which have brought holistic focus on their maritime sector have not only reaped tremendous economic benefits but also reinforced their maritime security.
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