Fake Maritime Institutes Leave Thousands of Youth High and Dry

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A crackdown has been initiated the Director General of Shipping on bogus maritime institutions offering fake competency certificates. This unexpected move has resulted in the closure of eight institutions.

What happened?

An network of bogus maritime training institutions was discovered after an elderly woman exposed the nexus via a letter to the Director General of Shipping. The elderly woman had sold her jewellery and property to enroll her son in an institution on the insistence of a broker. The broker had disappeared after he cheated the woman and her son by issuing a fake certificate.

The letter stated that thousands of young aspiring seafarers were left vulnerable with fake certificates. The letter stated that the youths were lured by brokers to enroll in these bogus training institutes.

Crackdown initiated

The DGS has started to crack its whip on these bogus institutions and has reportedly served notices to others found imparting practical training based on bogus documents.

A nationwide action has been initiated and inspections were carried out at the facilities of 133 institutions at New Delhi, Chennai, Puducherry, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Kochi, and Bhubaneswar.

Of the total, eight institutions have been ordered to closed down while serving others with a show-cause notices. The notices were served for using fake documents to help candidates clear the practicals in fire fighting, medical fitness and swimming.

Move to ensure quality

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.

Malini V. Shankar, Director General of Shipping said, “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”.

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.

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.

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Source: The Hindu

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