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Why India Needs an Ocean Conservation Revolution

Why India Needs an Ocean Conservation Revolution

Author: Rohit Gupta

Published:

Map of India showing the coastline along the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, with Sri Lanka and the surrounding Indian Ocean | India | Ocean Evoke India

In 2023-24, India’s official coastline grew from 7,516.6 kilometres to 11,098.81 kilometres. No land moved. No territory was gained. The coast had simply never been measured properly before.

That single fact is a telling place to start for anyone asking why ocean conservation in India needs to become something larger than it currently is. A country pays attention to what it measures. India has spent decades describing its own coast with a number produced at a resolution too coarse to be useful, and almost nobody noticed.

India did not know how long its own coastline was

The old figure came from records computed at a scale of roughly 1:4,500,000 or smaller. The revision used 1:250,000, along with GIS, LIDAR-GPS mapping, drone imaging and satellite altimetry, carried out by the Survey of India and the National Hydrographic Office. The new length was adopted by government circular in April 2025, and the figure is now set to be reviewed every ten years.

Coastlines behave oddly when you measure them. The finer your ruler, the more bays and creeks and headlands it follows, and the longer the line becomes. So the 47.7% increase is not an error being corrected. It is a country finally looking at its own edge closely enough to see it.

What is more telling is what happened next, which is not much. Search for ocean conservation in India today and the top result, along with the summary Google generates above it, still tells you the coastline is more than 7,500 kilometres. The number changed. The information did not travel.

What India actually gets from the sea

The objection to any argument like this one is that India has more pressing concerns than marine biodiversity. It is a fair objection, and the evidence answers it directly.

According to the FAO’s State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2026 report, India produced about 9% of the world’s aquatic animals in 2024, second only to China. The same report puts India first in the world for inland water catches, at 2.2 million tonnes from rivers, lakes and freshwater systems, ahead of Bangladesh at 1.4 million tonnes. Reported national fish production has roughly doubled in a decade, from 95.79 lakh tonnes in 2013-14 to 197.75 lakh tonnes in 2024-25, which is from about 9.6 million tonnes to about 19.8 million tonnes.

Read those figures carefully, because they cut both ways. The FAO category covers farmed and wild, inland and marine. The world-leading catch figure is an inland one. And most of the growth in Indian production has come from aquaculture and inland fisheries rather than from the sea. None of this tells you Indian waters are healthy.

What it does tell you is the scale of the dependence. Fish is not a niche interest in India. It is food, income and export for a large number of people, and the systems producing it sit alongside a coastline the country has only recently learned to describe accurately.

A third of the coastline is being assessed for erosion

The National Centre for Coastal Research, an office of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, mapped shoreline change across the entire Indian coast using satellite imagery and field surveys. The Ministry reported the result in December 2023: for the period 1990 to 2018, 33.6% of the coastline was vulnerable to erosion, 26.9% was under accretion, meaning it was growing, and 39.6% was stable.Two things matter about that finding, and the second is the one that gets left out.

The first is that vulnerable to erosion is not the same as lost. Just over a quarter of the coast is gaining ground. A coastline is a moving thing, and any account of this that reports only the 33.6% is telling you a third of a story. What it does not tell you is what has happened to the reefs and coastal habitats sitting along those shifting shores.

The second is the date. The assessment covers 1990 to 2018. It is the national picture India has, and its evidence stops eight years ago. For a country whose coast supports the fisheries described above, the most recent national shoreline assessment being that old is itself part of the problem.

The protection has not reached most of the water

This is where the verifiable evidence runs out.

Figures for how much of India’s sea is formally protected circulate widely. None of them is traceable to a primary government publication, so none of them appears here.

What can be reported is the assessment of researchers who have studied the question. Eklavya Tiwary and Dr Pushp Bajaj of the National Maritime Foundation argue that no area beyond India’s territorial sea has been given protected status, which leaves the exclusive economic zone, the far larger band of water where India controls the resources, outside the marine protected area framework entirely. They also argue that protection can be nominal where it does exist, noting that the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park area is treated in practice as a buffer zone rather than as protected water, and that community compliance is weakened where livelihoods depend on the same waters.

That is analysis rather than measurement, and it stands as theirs. It points at something the numbers cannot: controlling a resource and protecting it are different things, and India has done far more of the first. The species that depend on those waters do not distinguish between the two.

The government’s own answer is newer than you think

None of this means nothing is happening. Something is, and the most interesting description of it comes from the government itself.

Answering questions in the Rajya Sabha on 2 April 2026, Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, said that India has “for the first time, adopted an institutional and mission-mode approach towards ocean conservation” under the Deep Ocean Mission. He added: “This is perhaps the first time that India has systematically begun to tap and conserve its vast ocean wealth in a coordinated manner.”

He described the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology at Kochi, established as a national repository for marine fauna and biodiversity, and said it addresses “long-standing gaps in structured conservation efforts”. He also described BhavSagar, a new biodiversity referral centre.

Read that as the government’s own account, because that is what it is. A minister standing in Parliament said that structured ocean conservation in India is, in institutional terms, recent, and that there were long-standing gaps before it. That is a stronger statement than any outside critic could make, and it is the closest thing to an official case for urgency you will find.

It also has a limit worth naming. A repository is an input. Institutions created are not the same as fish protected or coastline stabilised, and no outcome measure for the Deep Ocean Mission has been published.

What a revolution would actually look like

The word in the title has to mean something checkable, or it is decoration. On the evidence above, four markers would show a genuine shift.

  1. Measurement that stays current. A national shoreline assessment whose data does not stop eight years in the past, and a coastline figure that reaches the organisations describing India’s coast rather than sitting in a circular.
  2. Protection that extends past the territorial sea. If the analysis above is right, the framework stops well short of most of the water India claims. Extending it is a legal question, not a scientific one.
  3. Outcome measures, not institution counts. The test of the Deep Ocean Mission is not how many centres it establishes. It is whether anything measurable improves, and there is currently nothing to check that against.
  4. Information that moves as fast as policy. The coastline was revised in 2023-24 and adopted by circular in 2025. In 2026, the most visible sources still use the old number.

 

None of those requires a new philosophy. They require the ocean to be treated as something the country keeps track of.

Why this is not only a government problem

It would be easy to end by listing things you can stop buying. That is not the argument here.

The argument is about attention. A figure nobody checks stays wrong for a long time. India’s coastline was understated for decades. Its national erosion assessment has been ageing quietly since 2018. Both survived not because anyone concealed them but because too few people were looking. The same pattern shows up in India’s plastic pollution figures, where the numbers in circulation deserve the same scrutiny.

Public attention is what makes stale marine data expensive to leave alone. That is a genuine contribution, and it costs nothing but interest.

Conclusion

The case for an ocean conservation revolution in India is not that the country is doing nothing. It is that the effort is young by the government’s own account, that protection appears to stop well short of most of India’s waters, and that the national evidence base is thinner and older than the scale of what depends on it. A country that is the world’s second-largest producer of aquatic animals, and that only recently measured its own coast at usable resolution, has a gap between importance and attention that is hard to justify.

The encouraging part is that most of what is missing is unglamorous and achievable. Newer surveys. A protection framework that reaches past the territorial sea. Outcome measures. None of it requires a breakthrough.

The next time you see India’s coastline given as 7,500 kilometres, you will know the number is out of date. What else would you want to see updated before you accepted that the shift had begun?

Sources

 

 

 

Aqua Lung
Canon
Go Pro
Ikelite
Insta 360
Mares
Nauticam
PADI
Shearwater
TDI
Rotary Club of Calcutta South CIty
Kuddle Life Foundation
Coastal Impact