Oil Tanker’s Drift to Mumbai Beach Exposes Indian Security Woes

The oil tanker that India towed off a Mumbai beach this week after it had drifted undetected through coastal defenses underscored the country’s continued vulnerability three years after a seaborne terrorist attack.
Salvage tugs fixed lines to the 76-meter-long M.T. Pavit and pulled it away from the shore Aug. 15, six weeks after its crew abandoned it in the Arabian Sea. The tanker idled across 370 kilometers (200 nautical miles) of Indian coastal waters, unobserved by the country’s Navy and Coast Guard, until it nosed into Versova Beach, near luxury hotels and homes in South Asia’s financial capital.
The ship’s surprise landing “is a wake-up call” that exposes holes in India’s effort to secure its coasts and biggest city after it has spent millions of dollars on new patrol boats and radars, said Vijay Sakhuja, research director at the Indian Council of World Affairs, a government-backed think tank in New Delhi. The administration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said improved coastal security was a top priority in 2008 after guerrillas of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic militant group sailed to Mumbai for a three-day assault that killed 166 people.
The undetected drift to shore of an oil tanker 28 kilometers (17 miles) from where those gunmen landed “shows that there are gaps in terms of materials and especially in human resources” in India’s coastal defenses, Sakhuja said in a phone interview. Mumbai again was the target for India’s deadliest terror strike since the 2008 killings, as three bombs killed 25 people in the city July 13.
Defensive Muscle
While the Home Ministry says more patrol vessels and coastal police stations have bolstered security, the country’s auditor general told parliament this month that the Indian Coast Guard is operating at no more than half of its authorized strength.
India’s government plans to spend $3.1 billion within three years on maritime defensive muscle, including ships, helicopters and a coastal radar network, according to a February report by Aviotech, an Indian defense consulting firm.
As with India’s acquisition of fighter jets and artillery, the purchase of maritime defense equipment has been slowed by government policies to avoid the arms-buying corruption scandals that brought down the ruling Congress party in 1989, say Sakhuja and other analysts.
‘Human’ Failure
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in October said more than 200 new coastal police posts and 150 boats for security agencies had yielded significant progress in securing India’s coasts. Amid such acquisitions, “the human element, which uses the equipment, continues to be as poor in its alertness and reflexes as before,” wrote Indian security analyst Bahukutumbi Raman in an e-mailed comment.
Last month, the drifting Pavit undermined the government’s assurances of improved security. The tanker, which hauls oil among Indian Ocean ports, began its odyssey off the coast of Oman, where its crew abandoned ship after the engine stalled in rough seas, the Indian Express reported, citing Jugwinder Singh Brar, managing director for the ship’s operator, Prime Tankers LLC of Dubai.
The News, a Portsmouth, U.K., newspaper reported that a British navy helicopter evacuated the Pavit’s crew June 30 “just before the vessel sank to the bottom of the sea bed.” In fact, the Pavit floated into Indian-patrolled waters.
In the tanker’s undetected penetration to Mumbai, “there was no failure on the part of the Coast Guard as the ship was recorded sunk,” said R.V. Prasad, the force’s public relations officer in the port city.
Low-Quality Recruits
Defence Minister A.K. Antony met the Navy and Coast Guard commanders Aug. 10 to ask that they “take all steps required to ensure that incidents like M.T. Pavit drifting into Indian territorial waters do not recur,” a ministry statement said.
India’s effort to modernize the Navy and Coast Guard is complicated by a drop over two decades in the education and experience of recruits, said Sakhuja, a maritime security specialist and retired navy officer. A generation after economic liberalization expanded private-sector career paths for ambitious urban youth, “military recruits are coming less from the cities, and more from the rural heartland, where the youth have had less exposure” to the sea and to computer literacy, he said Aug. 10.
Radar Upgrade
India’s Coast Guard operations “remain largely reactive” because poor planning has prevented the force from spending its allocated budget for new vessels to replace those that “have outlived their prescribed life,” said the report last week by the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General.
Of 14 new Coast Guard stations authorized after the 2008 Mumbai attack, five had been opened by the start of this year, and many stations nationwide lack docks or fueling facilities, the auditor general’s report said. The Coast Guard has not received the report and has no comment, said Gurvinder Singh, a public relations officer for the force in New Delhi.
The Aug. 10 Defence Ministry statement said India will complete about September 2012 a first batch of 46 radar stations, built by state-owned Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BHE) to identify ships through India’s 22-kilometer-wide zone of territorial waters. The Coast Guard commander said in January that network would be completed this year.

 

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