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India’s maritime education and training sector is set for a churn as its maritime administration, led by the Directorate General of Shipping, takes steps to introduce a new monitoring mechanism for institutes to ensure quality and uniformity.
The directorate will soon introduce a so-called Comprehensive Inspection Programme (CIP) that seeks to do away with the inspection processes a maritime training institute is required to undergo on a regular basis—scheduled inspections by academic councils, quality certifications by certifying bodies and grading of the institutes by rating agencies. These mechanisms have not yielded the desired results because these agencies lack expertise in the maritime field.
A comprehensive grading process by established agencies in the maritime field will form the core of the new monitoring mechanism for training institutes.
Ship classification societies (entities that verify ships for sea worthiness) authorized by India can henceforth offer their services for the inspection, gradation and certification of the maritime institutes, according to the new rules.
India for long has been considered a major supplier of personnel to the global shipping industry, which sees Indian seafarers as competent, efficient and cost-effective.
India owns just about 1% of the global shipping fleet but supplies more than 6% of the total seafarers to the world fleet. Currently, there are about 82,000 India-born seafarers working on board ships globally.
While this has been the result of the decades-old maritime education, training and examination system in India, there is a growing recognition that in the increasingly competitive workforce supply scenario in global shipping, excellence in maritime education and training is a necessity.
Maritime training in India was opened up for private participation in 1996. There are some 130 maritime training institutes in the country offering pre-sea and post-sea training in various courses and streams. These institutes function under the centralized control and monitoring regime of the Directorate General of Shipping. Still, there exists a wide variance in the quality of training imparted in these institutes. As the maritime training sector passes through a difficult phase due to the prolonged recession in international shipping, India’s maritime administration feels the time has come to introduce reforms in the regulatory processes for maritime training to keep pace with the competitive requirements of international shipping.
India has already taken steps to calibrate its seafaring supply-side mechanism to check systemic deficiencies after a few earlier attempts to rein in errant institutes failed.
The Directorate General of Shipping has imposed a two-year ban on approving new maritime training institutes and on increasing the intake of students in existing ones for all pre-sea courses to address the issue of shortage of training berths for students. The ban took effect from June 2012.
On-board training has become a big obstacle for students looking for a career at sea with the backlog of those waiting to undergo the mandatory requirement running into a few thousands. Unlike other professional courses, students are stuck if they don’t get training berths on-board ships.
The large and rapidly growing backlog of trainee officers who have completed pre-sea courses but are unable to get training berths on board ships—a prerequisite for their certificates of competency in the entry grade—has been a matter of concern for the maritime administration.
India’s efforts to enforce training commitments by institutes and local fleet owners to raise shipboard training berths have not yielded the desired results.
The CIP now being introduced involves grading of the various institutes broadly conducting similar training programmes and is expected to benefit stake-holders—the prospective candidates, institutes and shipping companies—in addition to providing realistic inputs to enhance the monitoring and control mechanisms of the maritime administration.
The grading will be based on parameters such as the quality of faculty and infrastructure, training facilities, quality of teaching process, performance of graduating students, placement of these students and an assessment of the long-term prospects of the institute.
A credible grading of institutes by domain experts will significantly help prospective candidates in deciding on the right institute for a particular course, as the process will substantially assess the relative quality of similar courses offered across various institutes. Moreover, since the institutes and the courses they offer will be benchmarked against internationally accepted best practices, students will get a fair idea about the quality of course compared with global standards.
The grading of institutes and their courses will provide shipping companies, as well as potential employers, with a tool to assess the relative quality of education imparted and re-orient their expectations with regard to on-the-job performance of recruits.
So far, the monitoring mechanisms of the maritime administration largely depended on the physical inspection of the institutes by teams from the respective academic councils, predominantly comprising technical officers of the directorate.
However, the growing number of maritime institutes and the increase in responsibility of the administration for the implementation of new international maritime convention requirements, aggravated by a shortage of technical officers, have affected the efficacy of the extant inspection regime, forcing the directorate to evolve alternative monitoring mechanisms to ensure the quality and uniformity required.
The change in the monitoring mechanism of training institutes comes at a time when India is looking to increase its share of global seafarers beyond 6% by tapping some portion of the shortage of personnel facing the shipping industry over the next five years.
But unless issues relating to the sustainability of the quality of maritime education and training are sorted out, this goal will remain a distant dream. In this backdrop, the maritime administration is headed in the right direction.
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/zalcUDiZWhPlqcQ32mbM7I/India-to-focus-on-quality-of-its-maritime-education-and-trai.html
The directorate will soon introduce a so-called Comprehensive Inspection Programme (CIP) that seeks to do away with the inspection processes a maritime training institute is required to undergo on a regular basis—scheduled inspections by academic councils, quality certifications by certifying bodies and grading of the institutes by rating agencies. These mechanisms have not yielded the desired results because these agencies lack expertise in the maritime field.
A comprehensive grading process by established agencies in the maritime field will form the core of the new monitoring mechanism for training institutes.
Ship classification societies (entities that verify ships for sea worthiness) authorized by India can henceforth offer their services for the inspection, gradation and certification of the maritime institutes, according to the new rules.
India for long has been considered a major supplier of personnel to the global shipping industry, which sees Indian seafarers as competent, efficient and cost-effective.
India owns just about 1% of the global shipping fleet but supplies more than 6% of the total seafarers to the world fleet. Currently, there are about 82,000 India-born seafarers working on board ships globally.
While this has been the result of the decades-old maritime education, training and examination system in India, there is a growing recognition that in the increasingly competitive workforce supply scenario in global shipping, excellence in maritime education and training is a necessity.
Maritime training in India was opened up for private participation in 1996. There are some 130 maritime training institutes in the country offering pre-sea and post-sea training in various courses and streams. These institutes function under the centralized control and monitoring regime of the Directorate General of Shipping. Still, there exists a wide variance in the quality of training imparted in these institutes. As the maritime training sector passes through a difficult phase due to the prolonged recession in international shipping, India’s maritime administration feels the time has come to introduce reforms in the regulatory processes for maritime training to keep pace with the competitive requirements of international shipping.
India has already taken steps to calibrate its seafaring supply-side mechanism to check systemic deficiencies after a few earlier attempts to rein in errant institutes failed.
The Directorate General of Shipping has imposed a two-year ban on approving new maritime training institutes and on increasing the intake of students in existing ones for all pre-sea courses to address the issue of shortage of training berths for students. The ban took effect from June 2012.
On-board training has become a big obstacle for students looking for a career at sea with the backlog of those waiting to undergo the mandatory requirement running into a few thousands. Unlike other professional courses, students are stuck if they don’t get training berths on-board ships.
The large and rapidly growing backlog of trainee officers who have completed pre-sea courses but are unable to get training berths on board ships—a prerequisite for their certificates of competency in the entry grade—has been a matter of concern for the maritime administration.
India’s efforts to enforce training commitments by institutes and local fleet owners to raise shipboard training berths have not yielded the desired results.
The CIP now being introduced involves grading of the various institutes broadly conducting similar training programmes and is expected to benefit stake-holders—the prospective candidates, institutes and shipping companies—in addition to providing realistic inputs to enhance the monitoring and control mechanisms of the maritime administration.
The grading will be based on parameters such as the quality of faculty and infrastructure, training facilities, quality of teaching process, performance of graduating students, placement of these students and an assessment of the long-term prospects of the institute.
A credible grading of institutes by domain experts will significantly help prospective candidates in deciding on the right institute for a particular course, as the process will substantially assess the relative quality of similar courses offered across various institutes. Moreover, since the institutes and the courses they offer will be benchmarked against internationally accepted best practices, students will get a fair idea about the quality of course compared with global standards.
The grading of institutes and their courses will provide shipping companies, as well as potential employers, with a tool to assess the relative quality of education imparted and re-orient their expectations with regard to on-the-job performance of recruits.
So far, the monitoring mechanisms of the maritime administration largely depended on the physical inspection of the institutes by teams from the respective academic councils, predominantly comprising technical officers of the directorate.
However, the growing number of maritime institutes and the increase in responsibility of the administration for the implementation of new international maritime convention requirements, aggravated by a shortage of technical officers, have affected the efficacy of the extant inspection regime, forcing the directorate to evolve alternative monitoring mechanisms to ensure the quality and uniformity required.
The change in the monitoring mechanism of training institutes comes at a time when India is looking to increase its share of global seafarers beyond 6% by tapping some portion of the shortage of personnel facing the shipping industry over the next five years.
But unless issues relating to the sustainability of the quality of maritime education and training are sorted out, this goal will remain a distant dream. In this backdrop, the maritime administration is headed in the right direction.
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/zalcUDiZWhPlqcQ32mbM7I/India-to-focus-on-quality-of-its-maritime-education-and-trai.html
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