SECURITY SCAN : Nov 21, 2019
FAST PATROL VESSEL
•The defence PSU Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE) has recently handed over Fast Patrol Vessel ICGS Annie Besant to the Indian Coast Guard.
• It is a second series of 5 FPVs built by GRSE for Indian Coast Guard.
•Fast Patrol vessel is medium range, high speed vessel design to perform multipurpose operations like patrolling, surveillance, anti-smuggling and search and rescue operations.
•More than 7500 km long coastline with 12 major and 185 minor ports are protected by Indian Navy with the support from Indian Coast Guard and FPVs playing an important role in this.
•Indian Coast Guard started in February 1977 and basically a requirement was that lot of smuggling was going on along Indian coastline.
•Navy had slow boats provided by Britishers and they were not of much use.
•Indian Coast Guard decided to build our ships and boats at speeds much higher than the customs.
•Initially FPV were called IP- Inshore Patrol Vessel.
•We got these boats from Japan, they were built there and then 3 of them were built in Gardenery Shipyard in Calcutta by transfer of Technology and other equipments.
• It is very important to bring these in context of 26/11. 26/11 created an urgent imperative for the coast guard to modernize.
•There were gaps in our Naval Security / Coastal security architecture that needed to be plugged and for that it was absolutely necessary that we bring these FPFP
• Modernization of coast guard over past 5 years, past 1 year had big platform 2000 + platforms that coast guard has commissioned.
•Arabian sea has got a very shallow shelf that means bigger ships cannot go into those creeks and narrow water bodies.
•FPV have quicker speeds, reached to 35-36 Knots, a knot is around 1.8 km so that translate to 65-66 km/h.
•The men on these boats can keep an eye on illegal fishing, smugglers and terrorists.
•It is completely build up by India and also exported to neighbouring countries.
• Water Jet propulsion are there in these boats to go into Shallow waters.
• Coast Guard is multi-faceted agency, it is most potent agency, the premier agency in the near seas.
• Patrolling is one part of the duty, duties like anti-poaching anti-trafficking, anti-smuggling etc.
• Coast Guard does a great amount of Search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, control of marine pollution and migration control.
• Coast Guard increasingly has what is now called as soft power potential.
•Indian ship-building yards have broadly supported, coastal project is major.
•Goa Shipyard has just launch Sachet contributing to efforts in big way.
•After 26/11 the coast guard came of very ambitious plan to nearly triple the size of its assets. Now it is on its way and a lot of projects are seen.
•Only 50% of their project requirement was actually met because of lower / shrinking budget.