Indian Navy’s Information Fusion Centre for Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR)

About Indian Navy’s Information Fusion Centre for Indian Ocean Region

• It was established by the Government of India at the Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) Gurugram in 2018.
• The centre aims at strengthening maritime security in the region by building a common coherent maritime situation picture and acting as a maritime security information sharing hub.
• The Centre also hosts International Liaison Officers (ILOs) from partner nations.
• The Centre hosts ILOs from 12 partner nations viz., Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Maldives, Mauritius, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Singapore, United Kingdom and United States of America,
• The Centre monitors the Indian Ocean and adjoining seas to understand each region and generates various periodic reports viz., Weekly Maritime Security Updates (WMSU), Monthly Maritime Security Updates (MMSU), Half Yearly Overviews and Annual Reports.

What is IMAC?

• It is a National Maritime Domain Awareness (NDMA) centre.
• It was set up for connecting all the operational Centres and lower rungs of the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard located along the huge coastline and the island territories.
• It is jointly operated by the Navy and Coast Guard.
• This is the main centre of the National Command Control Communication and Intelligence System (NC3I).
• And it tracks vessels on the high seas and gets data from the coastal radars.
• It is important to note that IMAC tracks only non-military or commercial ships, known as white shipping.
• Military ships, or grey hull ships, are tracked by the Directorate of Naval Operations, as this is on a classified network.

Q1) What is the United Nations High Seas Treaty?

It is known as the ‘Paris Agreement for the Ocean’, and the treaty to deal with Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdictionhas been under discussion for several years. The proposed treaty concerns the ocean existing beyond the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) that lie from the coast of a country to about 200 nautical miles into the sea.

Source: Navy’s IFC-IOR played key role in the backend in tackling vessel hijacking episode