Coastal security exercise concludes

A three-day coastal security exercise involving all agencies of the Andhra Pradesh government, the Navy and the Coast Guard and conducted off the Andhra Pradesh coast concluded on Saturday.

According to a spokesman of the Navy here, the security exercise codenamed HAMLA was aimed at validation of the readiness of various security, intelligence, civil administration agencies that are responsible for security of the State coast as well as the private and public sector enterprises along the coast.

During the exercise, various scenarios involving hijacking of merchant vessel, landing of suspicious persons and arms along the coast, terrorist attacks, unauthorised entry into ports, rummaging of merchant vessels, safeguarding of oil rigs in the KG basin and attacks on vital industrial installations were generated and the response mechanism was tested.

Large-scale operation

The exercise involved large-scale mobilisation of ships, personnel and other assets of the Navy, Coast Guard, police, customs, port authorities, oil companies and power generation installations. The integration of the fishermen community along the coast and acting as the eyes and ears of the security agencies was also effectively tested.

The coastal security toll-free telephone number 1093 which was recently established was put to effective use during the exercise. The lessons learnt from the exercise would aid all agencies to further improve upon the security set-up along the coast, the spokesman said.