The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has placed the lowest price quotation for building and maintaining a re-designed long-range identification and tracking system (LRIT) for ships for the government.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is an autonomous scientific society of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

“C-DAC has quoted the lowest rate for the project,” a Shipping Ministry official said adding that the C-DAC bid will be send to the competent authority for approval.

Tata Consultancy Services and Rolta India were the other bidders in the fray. The main aim of LRIT is national and international search and rescue as well as security and environmental protection. The LRIT regulation covers all passenger ships, including high-speed craft and cargo ships of 300 gross tonnage and above, and mobile offshore drilling units engaged in international and coastal voyages.

Any ship belonging to a flag State should transmit information regarding its identity, location, date and time of position to a country as soon as it enters the LRIT boundary (1,000 nautical miles) of that country’s coastal line.

The details should be provided at a default interval of six hours or at least four times a day till the ship leaves the LRIT boundary. Port countries, where a ship is likely to touch, have the right to track the ship any time during its voyage. A ship has to provide information on demand.

LRIT software currently tracks 650 Indian vessels and has some 300 users. The Directorate General of Shipping (DGS) is planning to extend LRIT services to more countries such as Maldives, Mauritius, Bangladesh and Myanmar, which is expected to increase the user base accessing the system.

The redeveloped LRIT software will be designed to manage 10,000 ships in multiple countries from the existing 5,000 vessels. The new LRIT system seeks to develop an Indian National Data Centre to identify and track Indian ships sailing across the globe and disseminate identification and positional information to entitled countries.

Besides, the DG Shipping, Navy and Coast Guard can easily track foreign-ship movements around the Indian coastal boundary, provide quick search and rescue, use LRIT to investigate hit-and-run cases, help in handling pirate incidents, as well as in protecting the marine environment.

LRIT has also been declared as a critical information infrastructure by the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre. This necessitated redevelopment of the LRIT system for which bids were called by DGS.

LRIT was proposed by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, to track about 50,000 large ships around the world. The LRIT regulations, drafted by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), came into force on January 1, 2008, and is binding on all members.

In India, the DGS had collaborated with ISRO in early 2008 to develop an LRIT solution. Antrix, the commercial wing of ISRO, sought support from IT industries, CMC and Tata Communications for its implementation.

The LRIT application designed by ISRO was developed in 2009 by CMC (under the guidance of ISRO). After CMC was acquired by TCS, the LRIT application has been under maintenance by the IT services company.

In 2016, the centre, through a gazette notification, declared the LRIT system, facilities, information, assets, logistics, infrastructure and dependencies installed at LRIT locations as protected under the Information Technology Act, 2000.

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