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Marine pollution has emerged as a critical global environmental challenge, driven primarily by land-based discharges, shipping, oil spills, overfishing, and the exponential rise of plastics and microplastics that now permeate water, sediment, and marine food webs, thereby undermining biodiversity, food security, coastal livelihoods, and human health, particularly in developing maritime nations such as India with long, densely populated coastlines and rich yet fragile marine ecosystems. At the international level, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) establishes broad obligations on all states to protect and preserve the marine environment and to prevent, reduce, and control marine pollution from diverse sources, including land-based activities, dumping, and vessel-source pollution, which are further operationalised through specialised treaties such as MARPOL, regulating pollution from ships across several technical annexes, and the London Convention and its 1996 Protocol, which restrict dumping of wastes at sea through permitting systems and strict prohibition lists. In the Indian context, the extensive coastline faces complex and cumulative pollution pressures from industrial effluents, untreated sewage, port and shipping activities, coastal construction, tourism, and rapidly increasing plastic and microplastic litter, resulting in habitat loss, coral stress, eutrophication, and contamination of commercially important fish species that support coastal communities. India has adopted a range of legal and policy measures--such as implementing MARPOL obligations through domestic rules under the Environment (Protection) Act, port state controls, and coastal regulation norms--to manage ship-source pollution and coastal development, yet enforcement gaps, fragmented institutional jurisdiction, limited monitoring capacity, and low community participation significantly constrain their effectiveness in practice. Emerging issues such as microplastics highlight a sharp global-local governance deficit: they are now ubiquitous in Indian coastal waters and marine biota, while international and national frameworks still rely largely on general obligations under UNCLOS and scattered soft-law or sectoral initiatives rather than detailed, binding rules specifically tailored to marine plastic pollution. Consequently, addressing marine pollution from both Indian and international perspectives demands integrated, multi-scalar strategies that combine stronger international cooperation, stricter and more coherent national implementation, improved land-based waste management, science-based monitoring, and participatory coastal governance, with particular attention to vulnerable regions such as coral islands, estuaries, and mangrove belts that serve as ecological buffers yet remain acutely exposed to cumulative anthropogenic pressures.