Maritime & Coastal Security: Threats, Architecture & Strategy

1. MARITIME & COASTAL THREAT FRONTIERS

Cue Words

Notes

Terrorism, Smuggling & Grey-Zone Threats

**Maritime Terrorism**: Sea routes have historically been used to launch domestic attacks (the 26/11 Mumbai attacks); vulnerabilities persist around offshore oil platforms, coastal nuclear installations, and crowded minor ports. **Narco-Terrorism & Smuggling**: Maritime corridors such as the "Makran Coast" route are used to smuggle arms, explosives, and narcotics that fund terror modules. **Grey-Zone/Asymmetric Threats**: Foreign deep-sea fishing trawlers and dual-use "research" vessels map India's EEZ and maritime choke points without triggering conventional military response. **Jurisdictional Fragmentation**: Divided responsibility among State Marine Police, the Indian Coast Guard, and the Indian Navy has historically produced coordination gaps at sea.

> **Summary**: Post-26/11 coastal security concerns have broadened from a single dramatic attack scenario to a spectrum of continuous, harder-to-detect threats — narco-terror financing, grey-zone surveillance vessels, and jurisdictional seams — that demand persistent multi-agency vigilance rather than event-driven response.

2. POST-26/11 INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE

Cue Words

Notes

Three-Tier Security & Coordination

**Three-tier zonal responsibility**: 0-12 nautical miles (territorial sea) — **State Marine Police**; 12-200 nautical miles (EEZ) — **Indian Coast Guard**; beyond 200 nm (high seas) — **Indian Navy**, designated overall maritime-security authority. **Joint Operations Centres (JOCs)** at Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Kochi, and Port Blair co-locate command hubs linking all surveillance agencies. **NC3I Network**: Fuses coastal static radars, AIS vessel-transponder data, and optical sensors into a single maritime surveillance picture. **IFC-IOR** (Gurugram): Tracks "White Shipping" merchant-vessel movements and shares real-time maritime-domain data with partner navies across the Indian Ocean Region.

> **Summary**: The zonal three-tier model plus the JOC/NC3I/IFC-IOR triad have converted post-26/11 institutional fragmentation into a networked surveillance-and-response system, though sustained inter-agency information-sharing discipline remains the operational bottleneck.

3. NEW MARITIME STRATEGY & INDIAN OCEAN LEADERSHIP

Cue Words	Notes
Indian Navy Maritime Security Strategy 2026 (INMSS-2026)	India released a revised maritime security strategy (INMSS-2026), following the 2025 Indian Maritime Doctrine, shifting posture from primarily defensive to proactively safeguarding undersea infrastructure (cables, pipelines) and countering hybrid/grey-zone maritime threats. India assumed the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) chairmanship for 2026-28 and continues chairing the IORA (2025-27) under its MAHASAGAR vision, prioritising maritime security, blue economy, and regional capacity-building — reinforcing India's "net security provider" role in the IOR.
Strategic Significance of Andaman & Nicobar Islands	**Chokepoint dominance**: Proximity to the Strait of Malacca (through which a large share of global trade and China's energy imports transit) makes the islands a natural counterweight to the "String of Pearls" strategy. Home to India's only **Tri-Service Theatre Command (ANC)**, integrating Army, Navy, and Air Force; also a forward base for P-8I Poseidon long-range maritime patrol aircraft monitoring submarine activity in the Bay of Bengal.

> **Summary**: INMSS-2026 and India's IONS/IORA leadership formalise a proactive, undersea-infrastructure-aware maritime posture, with the Andaman & Nicobar Command serving as the geographic anchor for projecting this posture across the Malacca chokepoint and the wider Indian Ocean Region.

4. VESSEL TRACKING, FISHERMEN IDENTITY & STATE POLICE GAPS

Cue Words	Notes
Fishermen Biometrics & Vessel Registration	**ReAL-Craft** (Registration and Licensing of Fishing Craft): a centralised database tracking over 3 lakh fishing vessels with mandatory registration and colour-coded hull markings for rapid visual identification at sea. **Biometric ID Cards** issued to over 1.5 million traditional fishermen enable rapid identity screening during boarding operations — a direct post-26/11 response, since the attackers used a hijacked fishing trawler. **AIS Transponder Mandate**: Satellite-linked Automatic Identification System transponders are compulsory on vessels over 20 metres, with pilot programmes extending low-cost transponders to smaller wooden boats to close the "small craft" surveillance gap; SLOC chokepoints (Strait of Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, Strait of Hormuz) carry roughly 70% of India's trade value, magnifying the stakes of any tracking gap.
State Marine Police Capacity Deficit	**MHA Coastal Security Scheme**: Funds construction of coastal police stations, interceptor-boat procurement, and minor-port security infrastructure — the main financing route for closing the "shallow water gap" (0-5 nautical miles) where deep-hull interceptors are typically absent. **Training Disparity**: State marine police are usually drawn from regular police cadres without specialised maritime navigation or search-and-seizure training, unlike the Navy/Coast Guard — a structural weak link below the Coast Guard's 12-200 nm tier.

> **Summary**: Institutional architecture (Section 2) is only as strong as the identity/tracking layer beneath it — ReAL-Craft and fishermen biometrics close the "who is at sea" gap exposed by 26/11, while the persistent training and equipment deficit in State Marine Police remains the weakest link in the three-tier zonal model.

5. COAST GUARD FLEET MODERNISATION

2026

Cue Words

Notes

ICGS Samudra Pratap

Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh commissioned ICGS Samudra Pratap — India's first indigenously designed Pollution Control Vessel, built by Goa Shipyard Limited (GSL). It is the largest ship in the Indian Coast Guard's fleet, meant to strengthen environmental-response capability and coastal patrol/maritime safety. Notably marked the first appointment of women officers aboard a frontline Coast Guard ship.

> **Summary**: ICGS Samudra Pratap adds a dedicated pollution-response capability atop the existing patrol/surveillance architecture (Section 2), while also opening frontline ship postings to women officers for the first time.

6. QUAD 'AT SEA OBSERVER MISSION'

2025

Cue Words

Notes

First-ever QUAD Coast Guard Observer Mission

On 30 June 2025, the Coast Guards of India, Japan, USA, and Australia launched the first-ever 'QUAD at Sea Ship Observer Mission' under the Wilmington Declaration. Two officers (including women officers) from each country embarked aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Stratton, sailing to Guam. Reflects the vision set out at the QUAD Leaders' Summit (September 2024), and reinforces India's SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) doctrine and the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI).

> **Summary**: The mission extends maritime-domain cooperation beyond naval exercises into Coast Guard-level, multi-nation observer deployments, embedding India's SAGAR/IPOI vision within the QUAD's Indo-Pacific security architecture.

UPSC Mains PYQs

• Maritime Security Initiatives: What are the maritime security challenges in India? Discuss the organizational, technical and procedural initiatives taken to improve maritime security. (15 Marks, 250 Words)
• Coastal Porous Borders: How far are India's internal security challenges linked with border management, particularly the long porous borders with South Asian neighbours and Myanmar, and their maritime extension? (15 Marks, 250 Words)
• India's Evolving Maritime Strategy: Discuss the significance of India's new maritime security strategy in addressing hybrid and grey-zone threats in the Indian Ocean Region. (10 Marks, 150 Words)
• Coast Guard & State Coastal Police: Discuss the challenges of maritime security in the Indian Ocean Region, focusing on the jurisdictional overlaps and coordination challenges between the Indian Coast Guard and State Coastal Police. (15 Marks, 250 Words)

• PM referenced India's Deep Ocean Mission (exploring undersea resources); two Indian aquanauts, Cdr (Retd) Jatinder Pal Singh and R. Ramesh, dived to 5,002m and 4,025m respectively in the French submersible Nautile - the deepest an Indian has gone underwater (prior record 670m) - as preparation for Samudrayaan (India's first manned deep-sea mission, targeting 6,000m via the indigenous Matsya6000 submersible by 2027); only USA, Russia, China, France and Japan have so far conducted crewed deep-ocean missions.