The Hindu Business Line : Ocean information services centre expanding operations

Right from helping fishermen in the coastal zones in the country with better yields and optimising fishing time to predicting storms, earthquakes and serving as tsunami warning system, Incois is now broadening its services to help shipping companies.

Incois or Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, a unit of Ministry of Earth Sciences, is now poised to go global by helping more than 25 countries in the Indian Ocean with its services.

The Director of Incois, Dr Shailesh Nayak, told Business Line that the centre has signed up with the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre to serve some 22 countries in the region.

It also is signing up bilateral agreements with the Mauritius, the Maldives and Thailand to offer its expertise and services.

Bulletins

Dr Nayak said “our bulletins help fishermen optimise their travel time and save on fuel costs as the information we provide helps them go directly to spots where they can get the best fish catch.

“The data are generated by information gathered from satellite imagery and processed through the centre.”

In fact, according to estimates, it is predicted that about 27 per cent of fuel costs would be saved when they use information provided by Incois.

Fishermen are accessing information from not just bulletins but get updates through kiosks and e-mail alerts and significantly about 4,000 of them access Incois Web site, Dr Nayak said.

Apart from this, Incois is offering services to shipping and logistics companies, and in oil and gas exploration, helping them optimise their efforts in a hostile environment.

Taking through monitoring centre, created by IBM, Mr T. Srinivasa Kumar of Incois explained how Incois has created models for 5,000 worst case scenarios and its implications by information gathered by over 300 sensors worldwide of them 30 located in the region.

Even as he was explaining, the computer systems threw up two earthquake alerts one in Japan and the other in Austria.

IBM POWERS INCOIS

The Country Manager of Information Management Systems, IBM India, Mr Kaushik Bagchi, told Business Line that the systems were built from the scratch in record time and combine the expertise of Incois teams and IBM’s design capability powered by databases developed by their labs in India.

The data centre created by IBM and its redundancy in case of failure of one system and also another backup at TCS, makes it extremely robust, he explained.“The company has signed up with Incois for continued support for next three years. We are also talking to several counties in the region who are interested in establishing similar warning systems,” he said.

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