Indian Coast Guard Holds PREx-26 Oil Spill Drill off Porbandar
The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) held an area-level pollution response exercise, PREx-26, on Thursday, 29 October, in the Arabian Sea off Porbandar, a port town on the Saurashtra coast of Gujarat in north-west India. The exercise was run by Coast Guard District Headquarters No. 1, under Coast Guard Region (North West), to test readiness for an oil spill close to the coast.
A total of 31 representatives took part, from ESSO-INCOIS, the Gujarat Maritime Board, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the National Centre for Coastal Research and the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology. The ICG said the exercise showed “strong inter-agency coordination”.
The ICG is India’s lead agency for oil spills at sea under the National Oil Spill Disaster Contingency Plan. A similar exercise off Mumbai on 26 December 2025 simulated a collision between a ship and a fishing boat that spilled crude oil.
The ICG’s spill response fleet was strengthened in January 2026 with the commissioning of the pollution control vessel ICGS Samudra Pratap. Built by Goa Shipyard, the 114.5-metre, 4,170-tonne ship is the ICG’s first with DP-1 dynamic positioning and a FiFi-2 firefighting notation. Its sister ship, Samudra Prachet, was launched in 2024 and has not yet been delivered.
The Gulf of Kutch and Saurashtra coast handle heavy tanker traffic for ports such as Vadinar, Sikka and Mundra. Faster, better-coordinated spill response means a casualty is more likely to be contained quickly, and prompt reporting by ship crews under their oil pollution emergency plans remains the first step in any response.
