Home Alone

Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab

Nearly a decade after the terrorist attack of 26 November 2008 in Mumbai coastal security remains a work in progress. If the recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is anything to go by, then work has not even reached the half-way mark yet. Worse, even the allocated monies have not been fully spent. For example, CAG found that under the Coastal Security Scheme (announced after the November 26 attack), the Andaman and Nicobar administration (under a Lt Governor) was allocated Rs 32 crore, of which only 14 crore have been utilised.

The story is more or less similar in acquisitions as well. The ministry of home affairs (MHA) had sanctioned Rs 302 crore for the acquisition of 10 large vessels and 23 rigid inflatable boats (RIB) for coastal surveillance. These vessels were to be assigned to the 10 marine operational centres (MOC), which were also approved. However, eight years later, the acquisition process has only just started, with tenders being finalised only last year. As far as MOCs were concerned, out of sanctioned 10, only one has been operationalised and four are still at the tendering stage. The remaining five have not even got off the drawing board.

One doesn’t need the CAG report to realise that almost a decade after the attack in Mumbai, Indian homeland remains vulnerable. The island territories of Andaman and Nicobar (A&N) as well as Lakshadweep are worse. Of India’s 7,517 km long coastline, the island chains of A&N and Lakshadweep account for 2,094 km, with A&N alone being 1,962 km long. Not only are these islands far from the mainland, they are sparsely populated and widely scattered. For example, of the 349 islands that form the A&N chain, the southern-most island is barely 150km from Indonesia’s Banda Aceh. Incidentally, till a decade ago, Banda