CHENNAI: India and Sri Lanka have begun "coordinated patrolling" along the International Maritime Border, Eastern Naval Commander Sureesh Mehta said on Thursday.

"It is at an experimental stage... we have a limitation. Our forces should not be crossing the international boundary. Similarly, their forces cannot cross the boundary and come to our side," said Admiral Mehta, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Visakhapatnam-based Eastern Naval Command. The aim is to ensure that there is no instance of firing at genuine fishermen and that criminals did not travel freely between the two countries.

Working methodology

Answering questions from presspersons here, he said this was a result of the many meetings naval officers of both sides had. It grew out of the working methodology evolved between the two sides. Both sides exchanged information on the location of their vessels and shared details of any suspicious activity in the region.

The coordinated patrolling was on for about two months now and, in due course, it would be decided if the arrangement was to be upgraded to the status of joint patrolling. As of now there was no such proposal. "We have not come to that stage."

The Navy was involved in joint exercises with many nations and had factored this into its "annual work-up programmes."

On the Eastern Seaboard, it had just concluded exercises with the Russian Navy. On the West, the fleet had completed exercises with the French. In December, the ships and personnel of the Indian Navy would visit Malaysia and Singapore for joint exercises. In the recent past, India had also begun exercises with Indonesia.

"We set aside a certain amount of time for this... Then there is a percentage of time, not more than about 20-25 per cent, that we spend on exercising with our neighbouring navies and other navies," he said.

Kalaikunda protests

Declining to comment on protests against the joint exercises with the United States at Kalaikunda in West Bengal, he said there was much to gain from the exercises. "We find that exercising with foreign Navies helps us to learn new methods that have been employed by someone... we can all develop our own things. But it takes that much more time... there is no need to reinvent the wheel. If somebody has found a better way of tackling a particular situation, and if we can get some benefit from that we would be very happy to take that. Everybody stands to gain," he said.

It was also imperative that countries cooperated because of the threats of terrorism, piracy and man-made disasters. Force levels available in a particular country may not be able to tackle these challenges alone. "Therefore, we need to pool our resources. To be able to pool our resources we need to work together, we need to have commonality of procedures, we need to know that we will be able to understand each other when we meet in an emergency," he added.

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