India’s Makran Maritime Intelligence Grid: How the Indian Navy’s Success Exposes Pakistan’s Selective Enforcement

India’s quiet success against maritime drug trafficking along the Makran–Arabian Sea belt is not an accident. It is the result of an intelligence grid that treats narcotics at sea as a hard security problem, not a press conference opportunity. While Pakistan regularly highlights flashy seizures in joint statements and media events, India has spent the past decade building an infrastructure of radars, data, and partnerships that makes it harder for traffickers to hide—and harder for New Delhi to pretend it “did not know.”

At the core of this system is Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA): knowing who is at sea, where, and doing what. India’s network links coastal radar stations, the Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC), and the Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) in Gurugram, which fuses shipping data, inputs from partner countries, and open-source feeds into a live picture of the region. Instead of reacting blindly, Indian forces use this picture to flag suspicious patterns—drift tracks, odd routing, dark dhows, mismatched declarations—and then move ships, aircraft, and boarding teams with purpose.

The difference shows up in operations. Over recent years, the Indian Navy and Coast Guard, often with agencies like the NCB and Customs, have repeatedly intercepted large narcotics consignments linked to the Makran–Iran–Pakistan belt and beyond. These include multi-ton seizures of hashish, heroin, and methamphetamine on mother vessels and dhows, routed through the Arabian Sea toward India, Sri Lanka, the Gulf, and East Africa. Many of these cases are intelligence-led: specific inputs, tracked movements, coordinated interceptions. Details—vessel identity, cargo, agencies involved, follow-up investigation—are placed on record through official press releases and court-linked action, giving observers a way to verify that arrests and prosecutions follow the bust.

This transparency is important. When India reports a major seizure, it usually identifies the agencies, indicates legal process, and, in high-profile cases, links the haul to ongoing investigations against networks. That paper trail can be followed in public. It may not be perfect, but it exists. And that alone makes India’s maritime enforcement record fundamentally different from an ecosystem where the story ends at the photo-op.

Along the Makran arc, that contrast becomes politically sharp. The same sea space, the same dhow culture, the same trafficking logic—yet two very different enforcement behaviours. Indian assets repeatedly detect and disrupt shipments that have clear signatures of origin or transit linked to Pakistan’s coast. Where Indian units act, they document. Where Pakistan should act—against launch points, logistics hubs, or repeat modus operandi on its own shoreline—the response is inconsistent, often limited to highly publicised, partner-branded “record” seizures that rarely translate into visible network-level clean-up.

In effect, India’s competence becomes an unintended audit of Pakistan’s choices. If Indian platforms, using shared and indigenous MDA tools, can track, intercept, and hand over crews and cargo to due process, it proves these networks are neither invisible nor unbeatable. It shows that with political will, technical capacity, and integrated information-sharing, the Makran–Arabian Sea corridor can be policed more aggressively. When, despite this, key launch areas and facilitators on the Pakistani side keep resurfacing in open-source mapping and UN/UNODC assessments, the problem starts to look less like incapacity and more like selective enforcement.

The regional architecture around IFC-IOR amplifies this effect. By design, the centre shares non-sensitive shipping information and incident data with dozens of countries and multinational centres. That means trends in narcotics trafficking—routes, vessel types, frequency—are no longer locked inside one navy’s classified files. Partners can see broad patterns for themselves. When those patterns show recurring narco-dhows emerging from the same coastline where the host state claims strong control and yet delivers mostly stage-managed results, it erodes the credibility of that claim.

None of this is chest-thumping. India still faces major challenges: long coastlines, busy sea lanes, clever traffickers, and uneven capacity. But the structure it has built—coastal surveillance, fusion centres, joint ops, open reporting, and prosecutions—meets a basic test: seizures are rooted in a system, not in a moment. That is why this “Makran Maritime Intelligence Grid” matters to the wider narrative. It quietly strips Islamabad of its favourite excuse: that it did not know, or could not help, or was simply overwhelmed.

When one state in the same waters can repeatedly detect and document what another state claims is beyond its reach, the contrast speaks for itself. India’s record along the Makran–Arabian Sea belt does more than protect its own shores. It exposes, by example, how real enforcement looks—and how selective enforcement elsewhere fuels the very drug pipelines the region is being asked to believe are under control.

(Aritra Banerjee is a columnist specialising in Defence, Strategic Affairs, and Indo-Pacific geopolitics. He is the co-author of The Indian Navy @75: Reminiscing the Voyage. Having spent his formative years in the United States before returning to India, he brings a global outlook and first-hand insight to his reporting from foreign assignments and internal security environments such as Kashmir. He holds a Master’s in International Relations, Security & Strategy from O.P. Jindal Global University, a Bachelor’s in Mass Media from the University of Mumbai, and Professional Education in Strategic Communications from King’s College London (King’s Institute for Applied Security Studies).