Union Home Minister Amit Shah has set a deadline on a matter which has been on the security establishment's agenda in fits and starts for almost two decades. Shah said the Ministry of Home Affairs would "move forward very seriously" on coastal security in the next two years during the 28th meeting of the Western Zonal Council at Panaji on Monday. The statement, given to the chief ministers of Goa, Gujarat and Maharashtra and the administrator of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, was short but comes at a time when both the economics and threat picture along India's western coast have changed significantly enough to be more than just ceremonial.

It's not by chance. The announcement coincided with Chief Minister Pramod Sawant's meeting with the state police on law and order and security situation on the day, which included coastal security among other issues under discussion on the police's performance in the state. Shah also requested the western region to play an active role in executing the Nyaya Sanhitas and also make the struggle against narcotics a success story in India, where two strands are tightly woven together on the coast of the Arabian Sea.

It has become one of the busier drug corridors in South Asia. The Narcotics Control Bureau, in a joint operation with the Navy, arrested nearly 800 kg of narcotics valued at around Rs 2,000 crore from a ship off the coast of Gujarat in the Arabian Sea in one of the larger seizures. The seizure, of 3,300 kilograms off the Gujarat coast, offloaded from Iran's Chabahar port, was the biggest of its kind in the country off the coast and officials at the time said flatly that the Arabian Sea route was being increasingly used by traffickers because the coastline itself was porous.

The trend has continued. The Anti-Terrorism Squad in Gujarat and Coast Guard intercepted 300kg of methamphetamine worth nearly Rs 1,800 crore near the international maritime boundary last year and a joint probe off Mundra just months ago found that 115kg of cocaine valued at nearly Rs 1,150 crore was transported by cargo vessels and fishing boats. From Kutch, a separate case of ₹1000 crore worth of cocaine has been seized from a ship that came from Port Qasim in Pakistan, showing the India-Pakistan maritime border is not a battleground.

It is number size that makes these numbers significant beyond the scope of law enforcement bulletins. On one hand, the length of India's coastline is 11,000 kilometres, based on the geospatial definition, and 7500 kilometres, based on the traditional definition; on the other hand, India's Exclusive Economic Zone is about 2 million square kilometres.

Nearly 95 per cent of the country's trade is carried by sea, while the blue economy, which encompasses fisheries, shipping, offshore energy and coastal tourism, accounts for an estimated 4 per cent of GDP, with plans to increase this to double by 2047 by the government. Small boat fishermen and port employees among millions of livelihoods live directly on this coastline, which is why a loss of surveillance is not just a security problem, it's an economic one too. That's why the coastline has been a part of the security establishment's focus since 2008: in principle, a smuggling network can also smuggle people, weapons or worse.

The history is one that needs to be remembered for it provides an understanding of the scepticism that awaits a new two-year undertaking. After the Mumbai attacks, a special unit of the Navy was established called the Sagar Prahari Bal comprising around a thousand members and dozens of fast interceptor boats within a few months. In the following years a coastal radar chain consisting of 46 stations was established and a second chain of almost 40 additional stations was planned to fill in the gaps.

Joint operations centres were established in Mumbai, Kochi, Visakhapatnam and Port Blair to integrate data from ships, radars and satellite feeds to produce a “real-time picture”. However it is not a decade later since a serving defence minister was pointing out live gaps in the same radar coverage between Karwar and Ratnagiri, which smugglers exploited 26/11 a decade ago, to name only one. The infrastructure is there, but the density and follow-through has consistently been lacking for the past, and the space that Shah's comments now promise to close.

It is also a broader regional dynamic that puts this push on the map. The west coast of India is on the shores of a maritime neighbourhood that has been plagued by trafficking cases from Pakistan's coasts, and where Iran's Chabahar corridor has emerged as a key consideration in India's efforts to curb trafficking as Beijing's presence on the Indian Ocean ranges from naval to commercial, from border to deep sea.

In this regard, the trajectory of the surveillance industry is illustrative: AI-based fusion of satellite imagery, automatic identification system data and radar feeds are increasingly the differentiating factors between a coastline that simply senses a threat and one capable of responding to what those sensors detect in time to intercept the threat. Private tech firms operating in this area have long contended that the things that delay Indian coastal security are not the procurement of equipment but its speed and reliability of data from various sources being transformed into an alert getting to a patrol boat before a consignment reaches the coast.