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发帖数: 3875 | 1 Oil Tanker’s Drift to Mumbai Beach Exposes Indian Security Woes
2011-08-16 18:30:01.1 GMT
By Siddharth Philip and James Rupert
Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) -- 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. to identify ships
through India’s 22-kilometer-wide zone of territorial waters.
The Coast Guard commander said in January that network would b |
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