The global community is witnessing massive strategic deployments in the Indo-Pacific region and the tropical waters need specialized underwater capabilities to manage strategic security and blue economic objectives. Effective Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA), will be the most critical driver for the Security And Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR) vision – an ambitious declaration to claim India’s leadership in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and beyond. The demographic bulge in India can be channelized effectively to provide the talent pool across all levels to drive the global agenda.
The UDA framework, as presented in figure-1 below, provides policy & technology interventions along with acoustic capacity & capability building, both for marine and freshwater systems. The four stakeholders, namely 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 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