26/11: Navy prepares coastal security guide book for states

Drawing lessons from the 26/11 terror strikes, the Indian Navy has prepared a detailed guide book for all the coastal states of the country, providing details of every fishermen’s village, boat landing sites, vital assets and points and terrain to the respective governments.

The guide book, navy sources said, was prepared over a year and a half ago to familiarise the state governments of the profile of their respective coasts to enable a quicker response in times of emergencies such as the Mumbai attacks.

“The guide book has details of the villages, their population, sarpanch’s details including his contacts and coordinates. This will help the state governments to respond to intelligence inputs on suspicious activity on time,” the sources said here.

The navy has also carried out a mammoth exercise of preparing the database for 25 lakh fishermen, of which 70% population has been covered till date, for issuing biometric identity cards to them by next year end.

These apart, the Centre will soon take up a census exercise to map the population of 3,331 coastal villages that were identified for the purpose.

In the future, coastal towns and cities too would be covered under the census exercise, they added.

“All these are efforts aimed at making the fishermen population of the coastal villages and towns the ‘eyes and ears’ of the coastal security apparatus,” they noted.

Since January 2009, the navy and Coast Guard have carried out over 70 coastal security operations, apart from acting on nearly 100 intelligence inputs in the last one year on suspicious activities along the country’s 7,516km-long coastline.

The four joint operations centres (JOCs) of the coastal security architecture put in place at Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Kochi and Port Blair have established coordination among all the stakeholders such as the shipping, ports, customs, marine police of states and the fishermen community.

“We now have a direct hotline at the JOCs with each of the stakeholders so that the personnel manning the centres 24 hours could respond to emergencies on time. We have also set up a toll-free phone number 1093 for the general public to call us to alert about suspicious activities or emergencies,” they said.

With the government in February 2009 announcing the plans for creating a 1,000-men Sagar Prahari Bal (SPB) for securing the vital maritime assets, the Navy has so far recruited 300 men, trained and deployed them.

The state government’s efforts to fit Automatic Identification System (AIS) on fishing boats up to 20m in length too was progressing. “Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have implemented the AIS well, which Maharashtra, West Bengal and Orissa have to do some catching up on this,” they added.