India taking a renewed look at coastal security

BANGALORE: India has stepped up efforts to strengthen coastal security by scaling up monitoring and range of surveillance in the wake of Mumbai terror strikes, Minister of state for Defence MM Pallam Raju said on Friday.

After 26/11 there is a renewed look at coastal security and all possible measures are being taken towards strengthening it, the minister told reporters here on the sidelines of the golden jubilee celebrations of the 106 Infantry batallion of the Territorial Army (Bangalore Terriers).

"The Indian Navy is the nodal agency for coordinating coastal security and along with that the coastguard and marine police stations of the states will be actively involved in deploying coastal security", he said.

The monitoring, surveillance and automatic identification of small vessels systems were some of the areas being strengthened. "All these are getting operationalised", he said which would help in increasing the range of surveillance and extent of area being monitored. I am sure in due course we will be filling up all the gaps".

India is deploying both indigeneous technology and "the best practices that are there world wide" and the coastguard was also increasing the number of boats for patrolling.

"We are encouraging all coastal states to invest in patrol boats and marine police stations", he said adding he was confident this would help in having a strong coastal surveillance and coastal area protection.

On the time being taken for ensuring registration numbers of fishing boats venturing into the sea, he admitted there were several unregistered small vessels going out into the sea but efforts were on to get the automatic identification sytem in place to help detect such vessels.