Towards Viksit Bharat 2047 through the Blue Economy: An Assessment of India's Sustainable Development, Maritime Security, and Global Economic Integration
Author
Prof. Capt. Dr. Vijay Kumar Madugu
Abstract
India's 7,517-kilometre coastline and 2.02-million-square-kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone place the ocean at the centre of Viksit Bharat @2047, India's vision of becoming a developed, self-reliant nation by its centenary of independence. This paper argues that the Blue Economy is not a peripheral growth sector but a fourth strategic pillar of that vision, alongside the green, digital, and manufacturing economies, because it uniquely fuses three imperatives that the Viksit Bharat timeline demands simultaneously: sustainable livelihoods, maritime security, and global economic integration. Using a qualitative, document-based analysis of government policy, institutional reports, and peer-reviewed literature, the study evaluates India's principal blue-economy instruments the Draft Blue Economy Policy, Sagarmala, the Deep Ocean Mission, the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana, and the SAGAR–Mahasagar security doctrine against their delivery record to date. The central finding is a persistent 'ambition-implementation gap': despite a decade of programmatic expansion, the sector still contributes only around four per cent of GDP, constrained less by resource scarcity than by fragmented governance, an absent ocean-accounting system, and underused blue-finance instruments. The paper further shows that India's economic and security investments in the ocean are mutually reinforcing rather than competing, and proposes that closing the gap requires a single coordinating authority, a statutory ocean-accounting mandate, and dedicated blue-bond guarantees rather than additional standalone schemes.
Keywords
Blue Economy; Viksit Bharat 2047; Maritime Security; SAGAR Doctrine; Sustainable Development; Indo-Pacific; Ocean Governance; Blue Finance
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References
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