A letter from an elderly woman to the Director General of Shipping (DGS) has exposed a network of bogus maritime training institutions that have left thousands of young, aspiring seafarers with worthless certificates.
The youth were lured by touts to enroll in Marine Training Institutions (MTIs) that either exist only on paper, or do not possess the necessary training facilities.
The DGS has cracked down on the fictitious MTIs and served notices to others found imparting practical training based on bogus documents. The nationwide action follows inspections conducted at the facilities of 133 institutions at New Delhi, Chennai, Puducherry, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Kochi, and Bhubaneswar. Of the total, eight have been asked to shut down, while a dozen others have been served show-cause notices. The notices were served for using fake documents to help candidates clear the practicals in fire fighting, medical fitness and swimming, DGS officials said. The action followed visits by the Ministry’s teams to the institutes between January and March this year.
The action of the Ministry of Shipping (MoS) comes against the backdrop of its target to have more seafarers entering international operations. “India’s share of the global sea trade in future will be determined by the number of seafarers who hold a leadership position on international vessels. In this context, we [The Ministry and DGS] want to ensure quantity and quality of cadets and as part of that we have streamlined the institutions, trying to filter out the many fly-by-night operators,” said Malini V. Shankar, Director General of Shipping.
The Ministry wants to substantially increase the active Indian seafarer count from the current 1.55 lakh and double the number of Indian captains skippering vessels who currently number 4,000 out of 50,000 worldwide.
The woman who wrote to the DGS pointed out that she had sold her house and jewellery to put her son into a marine academy. After the crackdown, the touts who trapped her son had disappeared and the institute shut down. The youth was left jobless, she said. Complaints have poured in against the nexus of touts and institutes duping students and parents, relieving them of hard-earned money mainly from Jharkhand, Bihar, parts of Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, officials said.
Mere paper boats
As per MoS data, 2,05,294 students aspiring to be cadets, mariners, seafarers, are currently registered with 133 MTIs. Another 65 institutes are operational with a temporary approval from regulatory bodies, including DGS and MoS. Officials said an estimated 5,000 cadets produced by the MTIs annually are ‘unemployable’ because of the poor quality of pre and post-sea training and Certificate of Competency (CoC) issued on the basis of bogus facilities.
The MTI managements blame systemic rot in the regulatory mechanism for the present situation.
As per the latest DGS Standard Operating Procedure, the Mercantile Marine Department (MMD) has been asked to prepare and submit the report of the Comprehensive Inspection Programme for pre-and post-sea institutions online. This will ensure the MTI performance index is generated in real-time as per the passing rate of the candidates in various grades of competency, the officials said.
