Mitigating Sea Blindness in Maritime Domain Through Multilateral Efforts; “Land Divides While the Sea Units”.

Mitigating Maritime Blindness

The right of vessel to travel freely in international waters engage in innocent transit passage and have access to ports is an essential elements of international security while safeguarding interests of other nations. Despite many advances made in maritime surveillance and intelligence gathering, the oceans are still exploited for a plethora of illegal activities both by state and non state actors many gaps and ungoverned space remain in the global commons. Managing maritime security is a challenges endeavor. However cooperation and collaboration among global stakeholders could provide solutions to such challenges by sharing information and thereby creating real time picture. For that, it requires a region centric collaborative maritime security construct.



Addressing these challenges, like piracy, smuggling, illegal fishing and transnational terrorism demands timely and accurate and actionable information along with forces available to respond. But, the area is huge and costly for one nation to effectively monitor and secure on its own. In order to operate to gather and to share information, requires some degree of trust among nations. Where, national defense forces of any country is little reluctant to do. In order to overcome such distrust, it requires visits to enhance maritime domain awareness through bi lateral/ multilateral dialogues, capacity building by creating required infrastructures, maximize information sharing mechanisms, emergency response mechanisms for maritime SAR , technical support, exercises, training, expertise knowledge sharing, exchanges of port calls and joint operations, to foster understanding among forces and for capacity building.



However most of the traditional maritime security concerns such as inter-state disputes basically arise due to certain trust deficits mainly attributed to lack of transparency. They have to adopt corporation rather than confrontational approach without outsourcing visibility and security of the Indian Ocean. However creating blind spots of maritime picture will invariably exploited by the illegal actors. Therefore, it is very much essential for multilateral partners to share available resources and information timely for achieving synergy in actions against a common foe. The concept of mitigating sea blindness in Indian Ocean can describe with following four key features.

Effective Maritime Cooperation for Enhancing Maritime Security Requires Layered Approach “Together We Can – Together We Will”.

To face effectively to the threat, risks and challenges in the maritime domain, all nations must promote the coordinated efforts in tackling the above and national efforts must be taken to integrate various national maritime agencies without working in isolation to archive broadly shared national objectives. Mean time, it is mandatory requirement for them to integrate with regional and global maritime agencies in order to get the maximum results through building partnerships and collaboration. For that, bilateral and multilateral discussions between nations could be used to coordinate the activities. Further, global maritime affairs should be handled by all nations through consultation. The oceans must be governed by all interested parties through comprehensive and cooperative security.

Collective Strategies to Address Maritime Security Challenges

It is a duty of all stake holders to ensure the freedom of navigation and the smooth flow of trade and energy across the oceans to other part of the globe. Since 90% of global trade remains dependent on sea born transports. We all share the same interest in providing continued security in the Indian Ocean. In order to produce stability, which in turn allow the opportunity to continue to grow. The collective challenges we faced require collaborative, inclusive solutions. Since, through the Indian Ocean, it transits half the worlds containers traffic and 1/3 of global maritime oil trade.

No nation is capable of addressing challenges and threats in the maritime domain in isolation, No matter how advanced and developed it might be. Therefore, it is a requirement of seeking cooperation and assistance from all nations to keep oceans free from all threats and challenges. Even to date, many countries are assisting each other in numerous ways in order to developed and enhance maritime capabilities and capacities.

Important of Having Hybrid Maritime Courts and Mechanism to Overcome Problems Faced Post and Apprehension Due to Legal Issues.

In addition to the difficulties experience in apprehending such vessels which are engaged in various illegal activities/ transnational crimes, numerous problems are faced by the apprehended parties due to the legal issues. So that, it indicates requirement of a hybrid court which is impartial. The vastness of the area diverse nature of challenges and differences in capabilities of the navy’s are required to be taken into consideration by such institutes when dealing with such cases without being bias.

Protecting Marine Bio Diversity by Preventing Marine Environmental Pollution

Maritime domain awareness is not only sharing the maritime picture to curb illegal activities or monitoring of offenders who do not adhere to accepted regulations in the maritime management. It is also, about monitoring of exploitation of resources and about environmental pollution and degradation. Therefore, it is common responsibility to protect marine echo system and bio diversity by strengthening and promoting prevention program on marine environmental pollution and orderly exploration of marine resources. This will enable to archive green low carbon oceans. Further, it is important to look at maritime corridor which links east west and Vice-versa not only strategic security perspective but for blue economic environmental and security perspectives.

According to the discussions made above, eliminating maritime blindness is cooperated responsibility of the states and it is a mandatory requirement to take all necessary actions with available means and initiatives for a sustainable deployment to guard the sea. However, it is a huge challenge for most of the nations in the Indian Ocean.