Coast Guard to acquire UAV's besides 127 ships by next year:DIG

Panaji, June 5 (UNI) Indian Coast Guard is poised to acquire the state-of-the-art indigenous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to help promote various operations under extremely difficult circumstances including inclement weather.

This apart, the strength of the ships under the ICG would go up to 127 by the next year with preparations underway to acquire them for meeting growing requirements to protest maritime borders.

Disclosing these points at a press conference at the Vasco-da-Gama base of the Goa Base, Director General of Coast Guard Dr Prabhakaran Pileri and DIG R M Sharma said scientists of the Naval Metallurgical Research Laboratory, some of them from London, had inspected the samples of the black shore deposits in Karwar and other areas recently.

The samples, hitherto supposed to have been tar balls, were sent for analysis for experts opinion.

Initial reports, they said, were not really products of any oil but of some minerals which were still to be ascertained.

Meanwhile, experts opinion on using certain bacteria for eating away the oil spills was also being taken. This would ensure quick cleaning of the beaches affected with oil spills, they said.

Referring to the ill-fated Singapore ship 'Ocean Seriya' grounded off Oyster Rock Bay off Karwar coast in neighbouring Karnataka, they said a salvage team from Singapore had arrived and started decanting of the 610 tonnes of oil left in the broken ship with the help of the coast guard jawans and equippment including pumps and barges.

Once it was decant, the owners of the ship, in consultation with the port authorities had to decide whether the split portions of the ship had to remain there after dragged ashore so that it would not endanger the fragile marine environment.

Environmentalists fear that Ocean Seriya may become another ''River Princes'' that ran aground more than five years ago at Sinquerim beach near Fort Aguada in North Goa the removal of which had become a big controversy amid noisy uproar by ecologists.

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