The 2024 edition of the annual apex-level international conference of the Indian Navy – the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue (IPRD) – will be held in New Delhi on 03, 04 and 05 October 2024. It follows the recently concluded Goa Maritime Symposium 2024, which was conducted by the Indian Navy on 24 and 25 September 2024 at the Naval War Collegein Goa. (https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2058348).
In terms of conceptual positioning, while the Goa Maritime Symposium seeks to project the Indian Navy’s cooperative engagement at the operational level, by providing a forum for discussion among the navies and maritime agencies in the Indian Ocean Region, the IPRD is the principal manifestation of the Indian Navy’s international engagement at the strategic-level and addresses ‘holistic’ maritime security issues across the Indo-Pacific. The National Maritime Foundation (NMF) is the Indian Navy’s knowledge partner and chief organiser of each edition of the IPRD.
The first two editions of the IPRD were held in 2018 and 2019,respectively, in New Delhi. While IPRD 2020 was not conducted due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the third edition of IPRD was held in 2021 in virtual mode. Since 2022, successive editions of the IPRD have been conducted in the physical format and are specifically focused upon the deeply interconnected web of seven spokes (or pillars) of the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI). Each edition of the IPRD seeks to sequentially discuss threadbare the seven constituent lines-of-thrust identified by the IPOI, so as to provide “second-order-specificity” to SAGAR. Accordingly, the theme of IPRD-2022 was “Operationalising the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative”,while the 2023 edition discussed “Geopolitical Impacts Upon Indo-Pacific Maritime Trade and Connectivity”.
