The multi-polar global order is trying to balance the political and ideological confrontation between the United States and China. The West versus Russia, in the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is further complicating the new global order with massive economic and geopolitical impact. The energy demands and the food security concerns, post-pandemic, have caused massive geo-strategic complexities. Developed powers are hoarding, whereas developing nations are finding it hard to manage the basic necessities. The human race has exhausted the terrestrial resources and increasingly prioritizing the marine as well as freshwater resources. The unregulated and unorganized rush toward the underwater domain is causing serious sustainability concerns and climate change risks. With so many economic and political stakes, strategic security becomes an obvious stakeholder. 

The Indo-Pacific strategic space has become the de facto theatre for geopolitical and geostrategic power play. The Indo-Pacific region, by definition, is the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The tropical waters present very unique challenges and opportunities on socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political fronts. The massive underwater resources provide economic and cultural opportunities to make extra-regional powers covet its resources even at the cost of other stakeholders. Security narratives are created by the West to push their technologies and knowhow. However, the underwater survey using acoustic methods suffers severe sub-optimal performance in tropical waters. This sonar-based acoustic method was developed during the Cold War era for the temperate and polar regions, typically in the Greenland, Iceland, and United Kingdom (GIUK) gap. The degradation of the sonar performance in tropical waters is just about 60 per cent. This is a serious limitation for any Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) effort in tropical waters. 

The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), is a regional multilateral platform launched in Jun 1997. It comprises seven nations, including Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal and Bhutan. The uniqueness of this grouping is that it comprises over 20 per cent global population with a demography of young people, who are aspirational, talented, and ready to get deployed if given the right direction. Geopolitically, they are a benign grouping but with multiple confronting poles in the geostrategic domain. They can contribute substantially towards the massive sustainable blue-economic opportunities in the Indo-Pacific strategic space. Being at the heart of tropical waters, their traditional knowledge and practices - the region boasts of a long civilizational legacy that has survived the transitions of multiple eras of history - can be scaled up with modern technology and knowhow to build sustainable and climate resilient initiatives. 

Importance of Marine Spatial Planning

The Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) framework encourages the pooling of resources and synergizing of efforts across all four stakeholders, namely strategic security, blue economy, sustainability and climate change risk management and digital transformation. Digital transformation in the underwater space is the optimum way forward to map the entire tropical region manifested as Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). MSP has become the de facto governance tool declared by the United Nations. This will require serious UDA effort across marine as well as freshwater systems to ensure nuanced policy and technology interventions, along with acoustic capacity and capability building. It will seamlessly demolish the contemporary fragmented approach across the stakeholders and among the nations within the region.

Indigenous efforts in tropical waters, starting with modelling and simulations (M&S) and validated by field experimental Shallow Water Acoustic Measurement (SWAM) are the only way forward. The talent pool that exists in the BIMSTEC - in countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Thailand - can be channelized across areas of data analytics, underwater domain (acoustic signal processing), and for field deployment.  Indian talent is known globally for its data analytics skills, and coupled with the underwater domain expertise, can work on the MSP-based digital transformation for the region. The field validation can be undertaken by the coastal and riverine communities using their traditional knowledge and practices. Countries like Bangladesh and India have a massive demographic bulge and these young people need to be channelized for constructive engagement. Other nations like Sri Lanka are suffering massive economic crises in spite of being major maritime nations with huge blue economic potential. Fisheries, aquaculture, transportation, energy, minerals, climate change risk, sustainability and more can all be optimally managed with MSP.   

The recently concluded G20 summit reinforced India’s role as a major global power. The G20’s New Delhi Declaration has included ocean economy and human-centric development. This is well aligned with the Security And Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR), vision announced in 2015. India, through the BIMSTEC, needs to take the lead and be the driver for digital transformation through the MSP for the region and the world. Multiple areas of research, skilling, academic, innovative and strategic gaps need to be identified and filled. The initiative, will not only meet the requirements domestically but also project India as a regional leader to support the Small Island Developing Nations (SIDN), in their journey towards economic growth and prosperity. The UDA framework can provide a structured approach to managing the unique challenges and opportunities of the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific region. It can address all the 17, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the UN.

 (The author is Founder-Director of the Pune-based Maritime Research Center. Views are personal. He can be reached at director.mrc@foundationforuda.in. More on the UDA framework are available at https://digest.foundationforuda.in)