Stealth ship sinks security stock

It is almost impossible to locate a vessel on the high seas during the monsoon.

Juhu Chowpatty,the local label for the 6-km stretch of sand made famous by Bollywood,has been attracting tourists in droves this monsoon with not one,but two instances of a near-calamity turning into a big draw for gawkers. While MV Wisdom,a 147 m behemoth with a capacity of 9,000 tonnes,was spotted in time and kept authorities on high alert as it drifted dangerously close to the Bandra-Worli Sea Link before beaching at Juhu on June 11,the much smaller tanker MT Pavit executed the terrorists dream this Sunday,arriving stealthily on Juhu beach,cocking a snook at what authorities claim is a multi-layered coastal security system.

From the Western Naval Command to the Coast Guard to the Director-General for Shipping,the response to the sudden arrival of Pavit was amazement a vessel given up as sunk after its crew was rescued following alleged ingress of water in the engine room,had travelled several hundred nautical miles to reach Mumbai. On the way,she had ducked radars of naval and merchant ships and any number of boats and remained altogether hidden from the Coast Guard,which patrols the territorial waters of India up to 12 nautical miles offshore.

There are no chinks in our coastal security, says Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management. There are wide open gaps. Since 2008,all we have heard is that the Navy,the Coast Guard,the Mumbai Police and others have purchased boats. What are boats supposed to do?

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The 50,000 vessels around Mumbai at any given time can hardly be checked individually every day,Sahni points out. Its like asking 10,000 policemen to prevent a terror attack. Searching everybody or searching people at random are both flawed… You have to be able to account for all the legitimate operators on our seas,and then you can go after those not accounted for.

That Indias 7,500-km coastline is porous has been established repeatedly,from the RDX landings of 1993 to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack.

The one security measure that could have detected an adrift vessel like the Pavit is constant monitoring of a blanket radar watch that leaves out no vessel,all with GPS-based location data and registration details. Every single ship entering Indian waters should be mandated to announce itself to a specific authority,it should then be tagged and approved, says Sahni. It is either that or nothing.

But patrol boats that zip around for miles and miles trying to locate suspicious vessels could just as well be looking for an ant crossing the expressway,says Captain P S Barve,who headed the committee that drew up the accord for the Mumbai Port Trust and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust to share the Mumbai harbour navigation channel way back in 1988.

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He adds that some blame must be shared by the agencies that rescued the crew on board the Pavit if they did not give accurate information regarding the condition of the vessel.

They may have sincerely expected that she would go down, Capt Barve said.

Amazingly,sources at the D-G,Shipping office said the alert regarding the Pavit was withdrawn following a media report that she had sunk suggesting that not only are technical aspects of a foolproof coastal security system missing,there is also no clear mandate on who is responsible for what.

While the Indian Navy was designated the nodal agency for patrolling the sea following 26/11,the buck for the Pavit detection failure appears to have stopped with the Coast Guard.

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Experts agree that locating an object on the high seas during the monsoon is well nigh impossible. D-G,Shipping Satish Agnihotri agreed that a detection system that works even in inclement weather would have to be set up. But until then,more tourist attractions like the Pavit or the Wisdom at Juhu might well be expected.