The Northeast’s borders cannot always be secured with fences. Shifting rivers, porous terrain and difficult frontiers demand something more agile: space-based surveillance that can turn satellite data into timely, actionable and legally usable intelligence. Assam’s experience shows why the next frontier of border security is not more fencing, but faster information

In a riverine char (sandbar) of the Dhubri sector, perhaps 400 families might live in one season, but by the next season, it could be completely obliterated. The Brahmaputra creates and destroys land at its own will. When the char disappears, the families move away, and with them, the border too changes. This is the actual functional reality of approximately 61 kilometres of Assam’s border with Bangladesh, where electronic surveillance has to be adopted instead of fencing, because there is no hard soil there to erect a fence. You cannot put a fence in water. You can only monitor it.

I was reminded of this while chairing a recent discussion organised by SIA-India in Guwahati on ‘Space Technology for National Security and Border Protection’. This panel included a former Army Commander of the Eastern Theatre, a senior telecom administrator and scientist, a national security expert, and representatives of two new Indian satellite-manufacturing enterprises — institutions that did not exist a decade ago.

Assam has approximately 263 kilometres of border with Bangladesh, a large portion of which is riverine. To our east, we have a 1,643-kilometre border with Myanmar, where governmental authority has largely collapsed, and the resulting drug economy fuels insurgency. To our north, we have a neighbouring country that refuses to recognise Arunachal Pradesh as Indian and has established 628 border villages near the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the majority of which are located opposite Arunachal. And this country plans to construct a dam on a river upon which 70........

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