At sea on ocean goals: India must lead to protect marine health interests

With UN pledges on ocean health remaining voluntary, India must chart its own course to safeguard its maritime interests

Humanity is terrestrial, but its origins lie deep in the ocean. In 1967, when the world was negotiating the historic Law of the Sea, a Maltese diplomat, Arvid Prado said: “The dark oceans were the womb of life; from the protecting oceans life emerged. We still bear in our bodies — in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears — the marks of this remote past.” 

And the umbilical cord that ties us to the ocean is the stuff of life itself. The ocean generates half of the planet’s oxygen. It absorbs 30 per cent of all carbon