At the 7th International Maritime Security Conference held on May 4, 2023, Admiral Hari Kumar, the chief of the Indian Navy, said that the future of the maritime environment would be equally or maybe even more challenging compared to the present day.
The two-day conference is being held at IMDEX ASIA 2023 (International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference) in Singapore’s Changi Exhibition Center.
The collaborative entities are the Singapore Navy and the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, a Singapore-based think-tank.
The IMDEX ASIA event will be held from May 3, 2023, till May 5, 2023.
He called on the navies of different countries to work together to build trust, domain awareness, security, and inoperability.
He said maritime challenges and threats are transnational adding that “cooperation and collaboration are the key enablers for all of us in the maritime domain.”
Hari Kumar said, “But many of us are already working in tandem through various mechanisms that involve operations.” He also listed out cooperation and collaborations through bilateral and multilateral naval exercises.
The latest maritime exercise is the ASEAN-India which commenced on May 2, 2023, and will conclude on May 8, 2023.
Admiral Kumar also listed QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) – a four-country group consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the US that conduct the “Malabar Exercise” (military naval exercise) in the Indo-Pacific for economic and regional prosperity as well as countering China in the region.
He further highlighted that how India and Bangladesh settled their maritime differences through methods such as “Arbitration.”
The esteemed officer also answered a question asked by one of the delegates at the conference and stressed the need to follow UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on Law Of Sea), a set of maritime laws created by the United Nations for the naval sector.
Apart from the above agencies, 11,000 delegates from over 60 countries and 250 participating companies from 25 countries are at the IMDEX 2023.
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