India and partners tighten Indian Ocean surveillance, disrupting major drug routes through technology, coordination, and joint operations.
Indian Navy and Coast Guard vessels conduct joint patrols in the Arabian Sea to counter narcotics smuggling operations (Photo: File)
India and its partners are reshaping how maritime drug trafficking is policed across the Indian Ocean. The ocean is a vast highway for narcotics heroin, hashish, and now large volumes of methamphetamine moving from production hubs toward markets in South Asia, the Gulf, East Africa, and beyond. Because distances are long and smugglers are quick to change tactics, surveillance and fast information-sharing have become the decisive edge. Over the last decade, India has built a layered maritime picture and connected it to regional partners, making interdictions more frequent and better targeted. Yet every success forces traffickers to adapt, pushing the game further offshore and turning it into a constant contest of move and countermove.
India’s surveillance network now combines coastal radar chains, satellite imagery, long-range and ship-borne UAVs, and Automatic Identification Systems that track compliant shipping. The Information Management and Analysis Centre in Gurugram fuses these streams—along with inputs from the Navy and Coast Guard—into a near-real-time picture. This is not only a technology stack; it is also a way of working. Data is shared across services and with trusted foreign partners, so that a suspicious track spotted by one unit can be cued for interception by another. Co-located with IMAC, the Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region extends this collaborative approach by hosting liaison officers and exchanging “white-shipping” information with many countries and security groupings. The result is a wider, shared understanding of the sea’s daily rhythms, and faster alerts when something looks wrong.
Recent results underline the value of this approach. Through late 2024 and across 2025, the Indian Navy and Coast Guard, sometimes alongside multilateral partners such as Combined Task Force 150, interdicted several major consignments at sea. Individual busts ran into the tonnes, with street values reported in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These were not lucky catches. They were the product of layered sensing, fused analysis, and prompt tasking of units already on patrol. The pattern of seizures has also shifted. More interceptions are taking place in the southern and central Arabian Sea, far from coastlines that are now under tighter radar watch and subject to stricter port controls. This shows that the surveillance “net” has stiffened near shore but it also shows how criminals respond when the near shore becomes too risky.
Smugglers have changed the way they move their goods. Instead of relying on big mother ships that hug the coast and hand off cargo near the shoreline, they are venturing into broader ocean spaces and using smaller, faster craft—fibreglass speedboats and unregistered skiffs that are harder to spot and quicker to discard. Many of these vessels sail “dark”, with AIS switched off, or present as “stateless” to complicate jurisdiction. Crews change flags, swap papers, and favour night transits. Loads are broken up and transferred at sea to multiple receivers in international waters. So even if one boat is caught, much of the shipment still gets through. Smugglers also experiment with electronic countermeasures, hoping to degrade radar performance or frustrate tracking long enough to complete a rendezvous.
These behaviours are a direct response to enforcement pressure. When agencies harden a corridor by increasing patrols, fusing more data, and tightening port checks, bulk shipments become riskier and less profitable. The success rate for big one-shot runs drops. But the trade does not stop; it fragments and spreads. New “geographic blind spots” open up in less-patrolled parts of the Arabian and southern Indian Ocean, where distances dilute patrol density and weather can hide small craft. This displacement effect is familiar in counter-narcotics work on land and now plays out at sea. It demands agility from maritime forces, who must constantly shift from known chokepoints to wider, subtler patterns of life.
The response taking shape across the region recognises that no single country can cover such a large domain alone. India’s cooperation with ASEAN partners, the Combined Maritime Forces in Bahrain, and smaller Indian Ocean states shows how to fill the gaps. Joint patrols, common operating pictures, and standardised reporting allow one nation’s sighting to become another’s seizure. As the picture improves, so must the tools that make sense of it. Predictive analytics to flag “dark” behaviour, models to identify mid-sea transfers, and automated alerts that cue ships or aircraft are becoming essential. Investment is not only about more sensors; it is also about smarter use of the data already collected.
Policy choices therefore point in three clear directions. First, double down on fusion. Keeping IMAC and IFC-IOR at the centre of a whole-of-government system—and upgrading them with more compute, better algorithms, and resilient links to coastal and space-based sensors—will keep the shared picture fresh. Second, grow partnerships. Expanding liaison networks, white-shipping agreements, and real-time channels with willing neighbours will help stretch limited patrol assets over far larger areas. Third, patrol where criminals move, not just where they moved last year. That means risk-based tasking, flexible deployments, and legal readiness to board and process stateless vessels while preserving clean chains of evidence for prosecution.
The broader lesson is simple. Technology and teamwork have made the Indian Ocean a harder place for drug cartels to operate, as shown by the large multi-ton seizures of 2024–2025. But trafficking is adaptive and mobile. Sustainable gains will come from keeping the maritime picture live, sharing it quickly, and operating together in the “in-between” spaces of the high seas. With persistent investment in sensors, smarter analytics, and multinational habits of cooperation, India and its partners can stay a step ahead in this long campaign against ocean-borne narcotics.
(Aritra Banerjee is a Defence and Security analyst)
