Project to prevent boats from crossing sea borders

After several instances of fishermen crossing water boundaries in the deep sea and getting arrested, the central government has now come up with a project to prevent fishermen from mistakenly crossing into international waters while fishing. This project was firstly started in Gujarat as a pilot project.

The project included GPRS-fitted alarms in shipping boats, which emerged as a successful endeavour. The officials have, therefore, decided that the project would be used in all major coastal areas of the country. According to an official, Mumbai’s coasts are on priority list to begin with this project.

It will include fitting a specially built small device termed as ‘fishing transformers’ in the fishing boats. The device is a GPRS connected device that will raise an alarm when the fishing boat crosses into international water territory.

An official from Indian maritime security department, commenting on the same, said, “Fishing trawlers often unknowingly tend to cross the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) in pursuit of expensive fish, only to be trapped by the Pakistani Maritime Security Agencies, and many a time are the target of terror groups also. Most of the captains of small vessel are illiterate. The coast guard and maritime police have often conducted sessions with them and informed them about maritime boarders and security concerns but even then several such incidents have been occurring.”

The Central government has proposed that automatic identification system (AIS) transponders and distress alarm transmitter system (DATS) be installed in fishing trawlers.

These AIS transponders are capable of providing information about a ship to other ships and to coastal authorities automatically. These alarms will ring when the vessel crosses any maritime boarder, to alert the captain of the boat.