In form of Quad Grouping consisting of India, Australia, Japan and the US looks to roll out An Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) Initiative Government officials say two issues limit India’s ability to further expand its role, for information sharing and maritime surveillance across the region. These are infrastructure constraints and persistent delays in deploying Indian liaison officers to other facilities and centers in the region.
“There is interest and requests have been made to several countries to deploy International Liaison Officers (ILOs) in the Information Fusion Center-Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) of the Indian Navy, but due to infrastructure constraints, this is not the case at this time. Couldn’t be more involved. “The proposal for extension is pending with the Defense Ministry for two years,” a government official said. Hindu on condition of anonymity, which was also acknowledged by diplomatic sources.
In December 2021, Navy Chief Admiral R. Hari Kumar said IFC-IOR . ILOs from 14 countries have been invited to join, South Block officials said there are more countries of interest in the region and beyond.
The scope of information sharing for the MDA has expanded significantly in recent years in the backdrop of the expanding Chinese naval presence throughout the region, including in the Quad countries as well as the coastal states.
Elaborating on the value addition of ILOs, the official said that ILOs bring out one’s local expertise which we do not know about and cannot be determined from here and build relationships with different agencies in our country. also help.
At a different level, neighboring countries joining our information sharing framework is a strategic statement that these countries are in alliance with India for their security needs, the official said. A South Block official cautioned that the initiative would not be affected if immediate action was not taken as countries would lose interest.
The official quoted earlier said that not only is it important to have an ILO in India, but it is equally important that officers of the Indian Navy be stationed at similar centers in other countries.
The IPMDA initiative was announced at the Quad Leaders Summit in Tokyo on May 24 to track “dark shipping” and create a “faster, wider, and more accurate oceanographic picture of near-real-time movements in partners’ waters.” Important regions in the Indo-Pacific – Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia and IOR.
The proposal to deploy Indian Naval Liaison Officers (LOs) at Regional Maritime Information Fusion Center (RMIFC), Madagascar and Regional Coordination Operations Centre, Seychelles is pending for more than two years.
India joined the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) as an observer in March 2020 and a proposal to send a LO to the RMIFC is pending since then. Another proposal to post a LO in the European-led mission in the Strait of Hormuz (EMASOH) in Abu Dhabi has also not been approved so far.
In addition, there is a delay in continuation of the existing LO. For example, India has an LO at the IFC in Singapore since 2009. “We have not been doing our ILO in Singapore for more than a year. There has been no movement in the ministry,” confirmed two officials. This is a place where we should be, one of the officials insisted.
Officials had described that this is within the overall scope of improving the IFC-IOR’s relationship with other IFCs and eventually becoming the repository for all marine data in the IOR. With the impetus of IPMDA, it becomes even more important, as one of the officials cited above said.
The IFC-IOR, established in 2018, is located within the premises of the Information Management and Analysis Center (IMAC) in Gurugram and currently has 12 ILOs stationed there. India has signed White Shipping Exchange agreements with 22 countries and a multinational conglomerate.
Real-time image of Indo-Pacific
A fact sheet released by the US during the Quad summit said, “The benefits of this (marine) picture are enormous: it will allow tracking of dark shipping and other strategic-level activities, such as rendezvous at sea, with as well as improving partners’ ability to respond to climate and human events and protect their fisheries, which are critical to many Indo-Pacific economies.
The fact sheet states that the Quad partners will take this opportunity to initiate immediate consultations with partners in the region.
In addition to IFC-IOR, other existing regional fusion centers to be integrated are IFC located in Singapore; Both the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, based in the Solomon Islands, and the Pacific Fusion Center, located in Vanuatu, are supported by Australia.