The United Nations (UN) has declared this decade as the Decade of the Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development. The oceans and the freshwater systems are the primary regulators of the environment in the universe and it is important that we generate significant understanding of the huge water bodies that exist. Thus, Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) framework should become the priority agenda for the UN. The UDA framework as proposed by the Maritime Research Centre (MRC), in collaboration with M/S NirDhwani Technology Pvt Ltd (NDT), facilitates nuanced policy & technology intervention along with acoustic capacity & capability building. The UDA framework encourages pooling of resources and synergizing of efforts across the stakeholders and also fosters cooperation across nations globally.
The tropical waters have very unique characteristics on multiple fronts, namely political, economic and physically. On one end the political instability makes it easy for extra-regional powers to meddle in their domestic politics and also the non-state actors have a free run to disrupt peace and harmony. The socio-economic challenges on the other hand do not allow them to prioritise Science & Technology (S&T) to drive long term sustainable development activities. The most critical factor is the physical challenge of sub-optimal Sonar performance in the tropical waters. The Sonar technology developed by the West during the Cold War period is suited for the Temperate and the Polar waters and the degradation of performance in the tropical waters is close to 70%. However, the West continues to export these products to the nations in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) at very high cost, knowing fully well that the performance is significantly degraded. The West generates the Security Bogey and pushes their military hardware to these poor nations. Field experimental R&D is important, however it is highly resource intensive and thus nations in the IOR find it difficult to encourage such efforts. The fragmented geopolitics ensured by the extraregional powers, further precludes any possibilities of cooperation. Local site specific appreciation is the key to plan any initiative. Governance is a big causality as these nations are not able to balance their expenditure and plan any long term sustainable strategy.
The Gen Next has to take the agenda forward and in keeping with the UN declaration, it is important to motivate the Young India to participate and drive the future. Multidisciplinary projects is the best means to get the students and young professionals involved in real world problem solving. The MRC has been conducting internships and fellowships for driving projects across multiple applications to support the UDA framework. The participants come from premium institutes like IITs and BITS that ensures highly innovative ideas being progressed. The truly multi-disciplinary nature of the interaction makes the outcome far more balanced and comprehensive. The project outputs have also matured over multiple iterations with numerous students contributing the overall evolution of the idea. Some of the projects are now matured enough to be taken up by the Start-up ecosystem.