"Maritime Domain Awareness is a collective good that no single littoral state can provide alone." Discuss with reference to IPMDA and India's information-sharing frameworks.

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) means knowing what is happening at sea that affects security, trade and the environment. That includes protecting seaborne trade and critical undersea infrastructure, and it depends on partners sharing information [1]. Ships, fish stocks and threats all cross maritime boundaries. So MDA can only be built by pooling data, which makes it a true collective good.

Why no single state can provide MDA alone

• Space that crosses borders: illegal fishing fleets, traffickers and pirates move across EEZs. No navy has sensors everywhere.
• Uneven capacity: island states such as Maldives control large sea areas but have few surveillance assets.
• Shared benefit: one common picture helps every state with disaster response and safe trade routes. IPRD-2026 stressed that MDA rests on information-sharing among partners [1].

IPMDA: pooling capability across the region

• Announced at the 2022 Quad Leaders' Summit. It gives regional maritime agencies near-real-time, low-cost maritime data to fight illegal fishing and to respond to humanitarian crises [2].
• At their 2023 2+2 Dialogue, India and Australia agreed to take IPMDA forward together [3].

India's information-sharing frameworks

• White shipping agreements: in 2014 the government approved deals with 26 countries and 3 multinational groups. They cover unclassified data and are "not security pacts" [4].
• IFC-IOR, Gurugram (2018) is India's regional hub [5]. By 2023 it had liaison officers from 12 countries and worked with 25 partner countries and 42 maritime security bodies [6].
• Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue (IPRD): the Navy's Track-1.5 forum. Its 2026 edition examined what IPMDA needs for information-sharing, and how to build underwater domain awareness, with France, Indonesia, Japan and Maldives [1].

Limits of collective MDA

• Implementation gap: only three white-shipping deals were working by 2016 [4].
• Shallow sharing: states share data on merchant ships, but not on warships or submarines.
• Trust and data sovereignty: some littoral states hesitate to rely on a system run by the Quad.
• Underwater blind spot: surface data does not protect undersea cables. That requires underwater domain awareness, which IPRD-2026 identified as a priority [1].

MDA gains value with every partner that joins. That is why India runs IPMDA, IFC-IOR and white shipping as complementary layers. Next, India should put its pending agreements into operation, train island states to use IPMDA data, and extend cooperation to the underwater domain. Doing this would make the shared picture complete. It would also strengthen India's role as a trusted net security provider, in line with the SAGAR vision of security and growth for all in the region.