Once adrift, IMU tightens norms for smooth sailing

After his B-Tech, Senthilnathan (name changed) joined a post graduate diploma at the Indi an Maritime University (IMU) in 2011. But his hopes of finding a high-paying shipping job were soon dashed. After completion of the course he had to do six months training onboard a ship to be eligible to get a competency certification as marine engineer officer and start his career.But with little or no help from the university or shipping companies, Senthil and his distraught family had no option but to fall into the clutches of a rogue shipping agent looking for fresh candidates to swindle. He was taken to board a ship from Singapore which did not have proper registration with the Director General of Shipping here in India.
His family has now already spent close to Rs 11 lakh including his B-Tech. Senthil had to remain onboard the ship for more than a year and has now managed to get a certificate from the Indian embassy in Singapore to validate his shipping experience.
There are many like Senthil who have passed out of such marine institutes that started springing up across the country to cash in on the boom in the shipping sector in the early 90s. But with the recession in late 2000s, the jobs dried up and the graduates of the institutions were left in no man's land, at the mercy of unscrupulous agents.
The logic of allowing so many institutes - some 37 affiliated to IMU besides many private and deemed universities - to train Indians for marine officer positions seemed flawed. Observers were also questioning the setting up of an IMU when the existing system of training Indian merchant marines had been working well.
The Indian shipping community, though a key player in global shipping in terms of providing officers to run the world's ships, was a relatively small but well-run world. Mumbai and Kolkata were the two big centres for manning and training. With T R Baalu and later G K Vasan running the shipping ministry in successive UPA governments, the government made strong efforts to open up shipping jobs and shift the loci of Indian maritime education to the south.
IMU was launched in 2008 outside the ambit of DG Shipping with its headquarters at Chennai in Tamil Nadu. Today, nearly half of the 37 IMU-affiliated training institutes are located in the south, some one-third in Tamil Nadu.
IMU was intended to streamline maritime education in India and take it to a new level, on a par with world-class maritime universities such as in Malmo and Beijing. The university started offering specialized additional courses like two MBA courses in port and shipping man agement and in international transportation and an LLM course in maritime law at its campuses.
But charges of corruption and irregularities against former vice-chancellor P Vijayan added to the varsity's teething troubles. "IMU suffered initially due to a total lack of proper administration whether it was in the case of recruitment of faculty or getting non-planned funds sanc tioned for administrative purposes. Frequent change of VCs (four in five years) took a toll too," said a senior official associated with the university.
Faced with complaints about the quality of education as well as for trying to do too many things too soon, IMU is now shedding ballast. As a first step in tightening up the standards of students being admitted in the institutes, IMU has made the Common Entrance Test as the sole entry method for admitting students from this year onwards. Earlier, private institutes had a management quota. "We want to ensure that only eligible candidates get admitted to the university," said K Ashok Vardhan Shetty, present VC of IMU.
IMU is considering a proposal to wind up its campuses at Kandla in Gujarat and Karaikal due to lack of intake of students.The university is also planning to drop its LLM course. To jumpstart faculty hiring and payments, the university has made a formal request for around Rs 50 crore from the shipping ministry to be used as nonplanned funds and is waiting for the ministry to release it.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to rein in the private institutes and control the number of cadets being pushed into the open market, DG Shipping is presently conducting a Comprehensive Inspection Programme to rate and grade the private training institutes on norms including infrastructure facilities, academic performance and placement records. Though the deadline had been fixed as December 31,2014, only 32 of the 140-odd institutes have complied with it while the others are expected to miss the deadline.
IMU officials say that with the upturn in global economy, job prospects in shipping are improving. "The effect of global recession and specific requirements on each ship will define the placement opportunity for the fresh candidates. The situation is slowly improving," said Suhas Joshi, company secretary of Chowgule Steamships Private Limited, a Goa-based major player in the sector.