Theeravetta is passé. When all stakeholders of seaward security along the Kerala coast come together again for the half-yearly coastal security exercise along Kerala’s shores on November 21, a fortnight ahead of Navy Day on December 4, it will have a new name, Sagar Kavach, which is how individual coastal security exercises of coastal States will be known from now on.
The Joint Operations Centre (JOC) located at the Naval Base here will coordinate the simulated security scenarios played out to test and revalidate the existing security apparatus. The exercise will cover the 593-km coastline of Kerala, 1.2-km coast of Mahe and 27 islands of the Lakshadweep archipelago.
After the Navy Commanders-in-Chief were designated as heads of coastal defence of their respective jurisdiction, the Southern Command too began to coordinate among various stakeholders in a bid to build capacity and improve efficiency of the apparatus. As part of it, four static radars with cameras were set up on lighthouses along the State’s coast in a collaborative venture with the Directorate General of Lighthouses and Lightships. “It lent immense domain awareness with regard to vessel traffic along the coast. Now two more radars are to come up in Alappuzha and Anjuthengu, thereby providing seamless electronic coverage of the entire coast of Kerala. It is doubtless a force multiplier,” says an officer.
Lakshadweep, which already has a surveillance radar, will have one more.
However, since it is the Coastal police and the Coast Guard that enforce the law over the territorial waters and the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), building their capacity to carry out the task is imperative. “The Coast Guard has two district headquarters and several stations and detachments in the region, with ships and boats to police the EEZ. The Coastal police are also gaining in strength and teeth. When Kerala gets its full strength of all 24 sanctioned coastal police stations, it will have better manpower and capability. While eight stations were commissioned in the first phase and five out of the 10 became operational in the second phase, the remaining five are in the final stages of commissioning. The last phase will have six more. Meanwhile, plans are afoot to have the coastal police headquarters at Fort Kochi. Also envisaged, in the long run, is a separate marine cadre, as “sea is a merciless medium and unless you have the salt of the sea in your veins you won’t be able to work efficiently at sea,” as an officer put it.
The Navy, sometime ago, had taken up with the State government the case for re-employing retired naval and Coast Guard sailors in the Coastal police, as it would get rid of the need for training them all over again. But a policy decision has not been taken yet. In the meantime, the Southern Command continues to train Coastal police personnel — last year the Navy trained 14 under-trainee sub-inspectors, three reserve sub-inspector trainees and 15 Coastal police personnel in scuba diving. It had earlier trained two batches of Kerala Police personnel on merchant ships, visit-board-search-and-seizure operations, seamanship, boat handling and basic navigational chart work at the naval missile and gunnery school INS Dronacharya at Fort Kochi.
An officer felt that besides strengthening the Kadalora Jagrata Samitis, there is a need to also co-opt traditional fishermen engaged in inland fishing activity into the security apparatus. “There could actually be paramilitary marine security forces for individual States, with a good number of the people drawn locally,” he suggests.
