Ghost Ship Sinks Indias Coastal Defences Claims

Ghost ship sinks India's coastal defences claims
thehindu.com/news/national/ghost-ship-sinks-indias-coastal-defences-claims/article2317195.ece
Children play near m.v. Pavit, a Panama-flagged vessel that ran aground on the Juhu
beach.
India's post-26/11 coastal defences have been brutally exposed by Pavit, a 1,000-tonne
Panama-flagged merchant vessel, which ran aground on Mumbai's Juhu shore on
Sunday, undetected by the new, three-tier security ring on which at least Rs. 700 million
has been spent.
The ship, which was abandoned by its crew last month and reported sunk, drifted for
more than a hundred hours through India's maritime territory before being detected late
on Sunday afternoon.
The Navy, responsible for security beyond 12 nautical miles; the Coast Guard, which
patrols the zone between 5 and 12 nautical miles; and the newly created maritime police,
all failed to detect it.
There was no official word, though, on who was responsible for the failure — the second
in recent weeks of an abandoned ship being washed up here.
In October 2010, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said India had made “significant
progress” in improving its coastal defences since 26/11. In particular, he pointed to the
setting up of control rooms to coordinate patrolling by the Navy, the Coast Guard and
the maritime police.
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Alarmed by a series of pirate attacks on maritime traffic off India's shores, Defence
Minister A.K. Antony said in January this year that coastal security was on the
government's “immediate agenda.”
Satish Agnihotri, Director-General of Shipping, said inquiries were needed to establish

“for nearly 100 hours when the ship was in Indian waters why the detection did not
happen.” He refused comment, though, on who might have been responsible, saying it
would not “be appropriate on my part to talk about the sister agencies.”
Long-standing fears
Long-standing fears that terrorists could exploit gaps in India's coastal defences were
underlined on 26/11, when a 10-man Lashkar-e-Taiba assault team sailed undetected
into the city on a hijacked fishing boat. Experts have since warned that terrorists could
also load ships with explosives, or even biological and chemical weapons.
In its report for 2010-2011, the Ministry of Home Affairs records that 183 interceptor
boats had been provided to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Lakshadweep
and Daman and Diu since April 2009. These States and Union Territories, the report says,
have also benefited from Rs. 4 billion spent on 73 coastal police stations, 97 checkpoints
and 58 barracks, as well as an annual grant of Rs. 1.51 billion for their operation. In
addition, the Ministry of Home Affairs gave Rs. 627.75 million to the Ministry of Defence
for 15 additional Coast Guard patrol ships with specialised capabilities.
Sources in the State government said Maharashtra had so far received 40 patrol boats
and was waiting for the delivery of 17 more. The boats were, however, not in use
because of the monsoon, the sources said. Police sources said the boats, delivered to an
accelerated timetable, also suffered chronic mechanical failures, and trained crew were
in short supply.
Sources in the police and the Coast Guard said the boats would be of limited use until
India's fishing boats were fitted with specialised transponders, which would allow
unidentified and potentially hostile vessels to be intercepted with precision.
Highly placed defence sources, however, said the trial of the three systems —satellite-
based tracking, Very High Frequency and Automatic Identification System — were just
beginning, and would take over a year to complete.
Global concern
Ever since 9/11, governments across the world have invested billions of dollars in port
security, fearing that hijacked or unmanned ships could be used to transport weapons of
mass destruction or lethal quantities of conventional explosives into urban
concentrations.
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The accidental detonation of 1,400 tonnes of explosives stored on SS Fort Stikine, a
7,142-gross tonne freighter, killed at least 740 people and injured more than 1,800 at
Mumbai's port in 1944.
In a paper published in the South Asia Intelligence Review, maritime security expert Vijay
Sakhuja recorded that India's port authorities were “conscious of scenarios such as a fully
loaded tanker exploding in harbours, explosives in containers, ship hijacking and
terrorists as stowaways.” However, he said, they were “constrained by the lack of
adequate security personnel and equipment.”
A senior official of the Home Department admitted that ships coming to the shores of
Mumbai did pose a security hazard, and he would convene a meeting between the Navy
and the Coast Guard shortly to discuss the issue.
© THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD.
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Ghost ship sinks India's coastal defences claims

Satish Agnihotri, Director-General of Shipping, said inquiries were needed to establish

© THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD.

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