Overview

India has the world's seventh longest coastline, the second largest maritime workforce, and an Exclusive Economic Zone of 2.37 million square kilometres. For most of its post-independence history, it governed all of this as though the sea were an afterthought. ""The Blue Dominion"" is the account of what happened when that began to change. Between 2003 and 2008, a Secretary in India's Ministry of Shipping inherited a maritime estate in quiet crisis - seventeen lighthouses flagged by the international monitoring authority for failing to show their specified light, dry docks operating at two-thirds of fleet capacity, fishing harbours whose breakwaters had been deteriorating for a decade without funded repair, and a vessel survey system recording deficiency closures that no one was verifying. The ocean economy's contribution to GDP stood at 1.1 percent. Norway, with an identical EEZ, was extracting twenty-two times that share. This book reconstructs what followed: the Coastal Asset Inventory that made the invisible visible, the budget campaign that translated documented physical need into the language the Finance Ministry could not dismiss, the vessel survey reform that moved a safety verification rate from 34 to 91 percent, the clearance of all seventeen IALA flags within thirty-one months, and the Blue Economy strategy document that articulated, for the first time in India's planning history, what the country's oceanic territory actually contained and what governing it seriously would require. Written by an independent observer who spent six years in the research, the account moves between the institutional and the human - between the budget negotiations in Delhi and the lighthouse keeper who watched his light drift for nine years, between the Planning Commission meeting room and the Coromandel beach at four in the morning. It is a book about infrastructure, about bureaucracy, about the political economy of neglect, and about the specific, demanding craft of administration in a domain that records only what was done, never what was intended. The sea is patient. This book is about the years India began, seriously, to deserve that patience.

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