The Security And Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR), vision is an ambitious declaration to claim India’s leadership in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and beyond. The global community is witnessing massive strategic deployments in the Indo-Pacific region and one must acknowledge that the tropical waters do need specialized underwater capabilities to manage the strategic security and blue economic objectives. The demographic bulge in India, can be channelized to provide the talent pool across all levels, to drive global agenda. Effective Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA), will be the most critical driver for the SAGAR vision.

The UDA framework as presented in figure-1 below, provides policy & technology interventions along with the acoustic capacity & capability building, both for marine and freshwater systems. The four stakeholders, namely the strategic security, blue economy, sustainability & climate change risk management and science & technology will be integrated to build an effective framework. The pooling of resources and synergizing of efforts will optimize resource deployment, particularly for the developing nations with limited resources. It works on five pillars, namely research, skilling, academic curriculum, innovation and strategy for digital transformation manifested as Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), across applications.