Expanding cooperation in the Indian Ocean for enhancing maritime safety and security, the Navy’s Information Fusion Centre for Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), located in Gurugram, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Regional Coordination Operations Centre (RCOC), Seychelles.
The MoU signed on Tuesday by Captain Rohit Bajpai, Director, IFC-IOR and Capt. Sam Gontier, Director, RCOC, aims to promote collaboration between the two centres towards enhancing maritime domain awareness, information sharing and expertise development, the Navy said in a statement. “This approach will allow the centres to effectively develop a common maritime understanding to counter non-traditional maritime security threats such as piracy and armed robbery, human and contraband trafficking, Illegal Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing, arms running, poaching, maritime terrorism, etc with a special focus on the western Indian Ocean,” it stated.
Single-point centre
The IFC-IOR was inaugurated in December 2018 within the premises of the Navy’s Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) in Gurugram. The IMAC is the single-point centre linking all the coastal radar chains to generate a seamless real-time picture of the nearly 7,500-km coastline and several Indian Ocean littoral states have joined the coastal radar chain network since.
Since inception, IFC-IOR has established linkages with several multinational maritime security centres. The centre also hosts International Liaison Officers (ILOs) from 12 countries — Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Maldives, Mauritius, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.
The maritime security architecture in the western Indian Ocean, implemented by the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) is supported by the Regional Maritime Information Fusion Centre (RMIFC), the Regional Operations Coordination Centre (RCOC) and the national centres of the seven signatory countries (Comoros, Djibouti, France, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Seychelles), the statement added.
