Critically examine the threats to critical undersea infrastructure in the Indian Ocean and suggest a cooperative architecture for underwater domain awareness.

Critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) includes data cables, pipelines and seabed sensors, and it carries the Indo-Pacific's data and energy flows. IPRD-2026 put the protection of this infrastructure and underwater domain awareness (UDA) at the centre of regional cooperation [1]. The threat is real but mostly accidental, so the response must be cooperative and not only naval.

Threats to undersea infrastructure

• Accidental damage: about 150–200 cable faults occur worldwide each year, roughly three repairs a week. Most are caused by accidents or natural hazards [2].
• Chokepoint concentration: cables bunch together at Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz and Malacca, so one incident can cut off several states at once.
• Grey-zone action: deliberate cutting, tapping or seabed mapping by extra-regional vessels is hard to detect and attribute.
• Repair fragility: there are few repair ships, and permits to work in foreign waters are slow. Outages last longer as a result, which hurts island states that have few alternative routes.

Critical assessment

• Overstated: most faults are accidental, so treating every break as sabotage risks militarising a commercial domain [2].
• Understated: the underwater picture is thin. In 2014 India approved white-shipping agreements with 26 countries and 3 multinational groups, but they share only unclassified merchant-ship data, and few were working within two years [3].
• Capacity gap: the Navy's share of the defence budget fell from 18.12% (2012-13) to 14.55% (2016-17) [6]. This limits the sensors and survey ships that UDA needs.

A cooperative UDA architecture

 Seabed acoustic sensors + satellite RF data (IPMDA)
                     ↓
 National centres → IFC-IOR (Gurugram) → partner fusion centres
                     ↓
 Shared alerts → joint repair & response protocols

Fig: Layered UDA architecture for the Indian Ocean Region

• Data layer: extend IPMDA's near-real-time maritime data to island states [5], and add acoustic sensors along cable routes.
• Fusion layer: make IFC-IOR, which hosts partner liaison officers, the regional hub for CUI incidents [4].
• Science layer: pool oceanographic data through the Indian Ocean academic network proposed at IPRD-2026 [1].
• Response layer: keep shared repair ships on standby and fast-track permits, in line with the guidance of the ITU–ICPC Advisory Body on cable resilience [2].
• Legal layer: a regional code of conduct on cable protection that builds on UNCLOS.

Threats to CUI come more from accidents and fragile repair capacity than from attacks, but the stakes keep rising. A layered UDA architecture anchored in IFC-IOR and IPMDA, and open to island states, would turn India's MAHASAGAR vision into shared regional resilience. It would also advance SDG 9 (resilient infrastructure) and SDG 14 (life below water).