The Hindu : Kerala News : Need for closer look at coastal security

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Friday, Nov 28, 2008
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Kerala

Kerala

Need for closer look at coastal security

G. Anand

State’s coastline, inland waterways are the least patrolled areas

Thiruvananthapuram: The possibility that terrorists could have used sea routes familiar to smugglers and fishermen to mount their current attacks on Mumbai should prompt law enforcers in Kerala to take a closer look at the State’s coastal security in the coming days.

On a recent visit to Kerala, Union Defence Minister A.K. Antony had said the country’s vast coastline should be reckoned as a ‘border’ which needed to be protected as good as its landlocked frontiers.

Though he was speaking more in the context of the growing pirate menace on the international waters off the coast off Somalia, his observation could never be truer for Kerala (which has a 700-km coastline and a maze of inland waterways) in the background of the Mumbai incidents.

Intelligence agencies had reported much earlier that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could be using Kerala’s coastline bordering Tamil Nadu for smuggling drugs (for financing its war against the Sri Lankan government), fuel, medicines, explosives (often sourced illegally from granite quarries) and provisions in fishing boats to their strongholds in the island nation.

In March this year, the Kerala and Tamil Nadu police jointly raided a boat building unit at Munambu in Kochi on the charge of building a deep sea capable vessel for the LTTE. The agencies say the State police have little record of the number of seagoing boats built in Kerala or the identity of their users.

A government decision in 2006 to register boats, chiefly to regulate the movement of fishing vessels fitted with in-board engines during the trawling ban in monsoon, is yet to be implemented fully. At a lesser level, sea routes and inland waterways are being used to smuggle illicit spirit into Kerala. Officials say spirit was till recently smuggled from Mangalapuram in Karnataka to Chavakad in Thrissur through sea and backwater routes.

The smugglers constantly change their routes to evade detection.

Official say that if unfixed such ‘broken windows’ could possibly be used by terrorists to mount symbolic attacks against national assets in south India, including Kerala.

For the past five years, the Marine Enforcement and Vigilance Wing, the State agency primarily responsible for sea rescue and coastal vigilance, has been hiring fishing boats for its operations. Its five high-speed and all-weather-capable patrol boats purchased in 1998 are in a state disrepair.

Kerala’s communally sensitive coastline and its mostly remote inland waterways and backwater islets are the least patrolled areas in the State.

The government is yet to implement a 2005 proposal to start a modern marine police unit to overcome this disadvantage.

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