Memories of Jahaz Bhavan.

The news that the Directorate General of Shipping offices have moved out of their office-‘Jahaz Bhavan’ at Ballard Pier - to Kanjurmarg in Mumbai leaves me with mixed feelings. Yeah yeah, I know the move is supposed to be temporary; that in a couple of years, once the old and unsafe Jahaz Bhavan is razed and rebuilt, the DGS will move back. Temporary events in India have a history of becoming permanent, however. I hope that doesn’t happen here.

Even though I was living in Bombay in the seventies (having studied, in fact, at two colleges each just a couple of kilometers away from Jahaz Bhavan) I had never heard of it. Like so many of us, I first entered that building for the combined interview for the DMET engineering and Rajendra (ex Dufferin) Deck Cadets pre sea training courses. I was all of seventeen years old. 

It was during that Jahaz Bhavan interview that I opted to join the deck side of the profession, even though I had selected engineering before the written test. (Why? Because a sailing officer I never knew earlier, and whom I met by accident on the road in Colaba, told me that the engine room was very hot, and I hate the heat. Such are the vagaries of life and the ease with which humungous decisions are made). 

Anyway. My decision was met with some typical Indian middle class disappointment by my parents, who were convinced engineering was a respectable pursuit but navigation was not. And, after the letter arrived telling me I had been selected for the Training Ship Dufferin/Rajendra, the home situation was not helped by my sister shouting gleefully to all and sundry that the “Duffer” (me, obviously) was “in.”

My next visit to Jahaz Bhavan was for my Second Mate’s oral examinations with the well-known Capt. Gill, who immediately started proceedings by locking me up in a room with a paper and pen after telling me to jot down the titles of all the hundreds (thousands?) of Merchant Shipping Notices I knew of. Then he went away. As time passed, I wondered if he would ever return; I had visions of my body being found days later in Jahaz Bhavan, dehydrated and starved, with urine and crap all over the floor and deep gouges that my nails had made in the walls. 

I remained rattled even later, which resulted in my inadvertently unscrewing the vernier drum right off Capt Gill’s sextant- he had asked me to take the horizontal angle between two cranes (one of them moving!) in the docks that Jahaz Bhavan overlooks even today. Capt Gill eventually passed me after two days, probably out of pity more than anything else.

I was meant to spend much more time at Jahaz Bhavan, something that became clear when I appeared at my Master’s exams some years later. My orals were taken by Capt Prasad, who was the Principal Officer then, I think. He was also without any doubt the principal terror as far as the orals were concerned; he had a terrible reputation of failing everybody, especially first attempt candidates like me. 

I still remember the look of pity I would get from all at the MMD and DGS offices every time he called me in for the exams, which was twice every single day for twenty two days straight, including Sundays. (In the mornings come to MMD, in the afternoon- Jahaz Bhavan, he announced on day one, in a tone jailors undoubtedly use even today when they inform prisoners about scheduled body cavity searches).

I lived half my life at Jahaz Bhavan for those three weeks; I knew that building better than my own house. A quarter of a century later, I still remember it all vividly. I still consider passing my Master’s orals from Capt Prasad one of the highlights of my professional life; I still get satisfaction from that.

Thousands of us have made the rounds of the MMD and DGS offices before, during and after our exams. We have spent hours sitting and waiting for Godot on those wooden benches. We have paced up and down, cursed like sailors and leapt with joy in those corridors. We have seen both the depths of despair and the exhilaration of victory within those walls. Irreplaceable memories reside there.

And so it does not matter to me that Jahaz Bhavan is going to be rebuilt. My real problem, I think, is that it is going to be razed at all. That those walls and corridors are going to be at all demolished seems to be the mini tragedy here. It is almost as if part of my history is going to be erased.

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Inside Indian shipping: A few good men

Some of the sound bites coming from India's maritime regulator in connection with marine education and training are interesting; I particularly liked the comment made some time ago by the Director General of Shipping that maritime training institutes should make a profit and not look to profiteering. Absolutely correct. The recent Directorate General of Shipping (DG) decision to issue a Continuous Discharge Certificate with a reduced two year validity to graduates of some maritime programmes suggests that there are teeth behind the bite too; with this step, the DGS wants to track better the 'placement record' of institutes, or more accurately, the lack thereof. We all know that placement is a flourishing racket in shipping.

Maritime training institutes will quite correctly point out that it is only ship owners that can provide training slots, not the institutes, and that the regulations and incentives rolled out by the DGS for Indian ship owners have failed in what they set out to do: create training slots for future officers and crews. I agree with these institutes, because things have reached such a sorry state that even officials in well known shipping companies- not just touts and middlemen- are taking bribes to 'place' youngsters, most of whom will never get a training berth aboard a ship without paying a fair amount of money to somebody or the other. The racket is an epidemic; most everybody is involved.

It is very possible that Dr. Agnihotri- the present DG- has plans that include a holistic addressing of the problems that plague the training business, and that the Directorate has just started- not ended- its cleanup move. Cynics will say that some of the DGS' initiatives are prompted by the recent ESMA visit to Mumbai or the crackdown on the MET business in the Philippines; I say that is irrelevant to the fact that the Indian MET juggernaut is in a mess and needs to be fixed- in our own interests.

But it will not be. It won't be because- in addition to deep flaws in our training setup- there are also weaknesses connected to the structure and execution of shipping's administrative and regulatory systems. Those need to be fixed too, else any clean-up exercise will be eventually incomplete and so ineffective.

The biggest weakness is in the very nature of the Director General's appointment; in line with protocol, the DG is transferred every few years and a fresh appointment made. The problem is that any person at the top of any government setup in India can only start to do good within this time; to complete a change requires time that he or she usually does not have. Changes to regulations in shipping may be mandated and quicker, but changes to a system- including the internal systems at the DGS- will take much longer.  We have to give any person of integrity, intelligence and ability enough time to perform.  We do not, so we always produce a half baked dish.

In this connection, I have never been one of those that say that only a mariner should be at the helm of affairs at the DGS. I say that the best person for the job should be appointed and retained based on performance. There have been many mariners within the DGS and MMD; at least some of those have either not delivered or have been otherwise less than suitable. The Indian system, like the British one, assumes that a transfer every few years ensures a clean system. It does not; we know that. Only an honest person at the helm - given enough time- can do that.

Coming back to the MET issues that we started with, what is likely to happen is this: The unsavoury elements that the DGS is trying to eliminate from the training space will wait it out, knowing that the next routine change at the top at the DGS will mean that a new person comes in, takes time to settle and prioritise- and that the system will then start reinventing the wheel again, more or less from scratch. Meanwhile, these elements will continue to exploit the cracks. 

I am saddened by this, because I do believe that the DG - at least with regard to maritime education- is on the right track. I agree that the MET business needs a cleanup. I believe that the on board training arm of our MET is its weakest link and a travesty. I would like to see the net cast wider than on just the DNS programmes and their 'placements' done thus far, to include all programmes for cadets, ratings and even shorter STCW courses. I believe we should not be training anyone that we cannot guarantee an on-board training berth to. 

Many in the industry often say that no education in the world guarantees a job, so why should we in shipping want to do so? They conveniently forget the fact that a training berth on a ship is not a job; by definition, it is part of the training that the industry is supposed to provide.

To be fair, the problems at the DGS are not unique; government departments throughout the country have near identical issues. Ultimately, the basic problem everywhere- including at the DGS- may be that the system does not support progress. The bad people do a lot of long lasting harm in their allotted few years and go; the good people can only start to do good in that time, not complete it. The good guys' reward may lie in walking away with integrity and with their heads held high, but imagine the change we would see if the system could exploit the full potential of these few good men and women.

Inside shipping: The war we do not see

It may seem that the hammering that shipping has been subjected to in the aftermath of the ongoing global economic cataclysm is the reason why many firms are reverting to their old habits of treating seafarers like dirt. Old tales of double accounting, seafarers paying for jobs, withholding of documents, delaying of salaries, signing of inequitable contracts et al are being retold. The industry would have you believe that this is an aberration, is not widespread and is an undesirable side-effect of the mayhem in the marketplace. I disagree; the maltreatment of seamen- particularly seamen from Asia- is a perennial disease. Only the degree of abuse changes with the economics of supply and demand.  

Ever since the depression in shipping in the eighties, an insidious and invidious hidden war has been waged against sailors working on commercial ships. The protagonists of this war are officials of shipowning and shipmanagement companies- although they have not conspired amongst themselves to wage war and there has been no strategic objective promulgated. However, the tactics employed by them over the last thirty years leave me with no doubt that the hidden agenda- perhaps even unrealised as such by some of those officials, many of whom behave by now out of habitual malignant ill will against seamen- is clear enough. This agenda involves the use of propaganda, lies, deceit and a not-too subtle degradation of the mariner's status in the organisation at every opportunity. This devaluation suits shipping's Edward Bernays just fine since their manipulation of the perception of seafarer worth seeks narrow commercial advantages as its aim. The more mariners 'stay in their place' and the more they are perceived by the broader industry as 'good only for sailing, and sometimes not even that'- then more the odds that they will continue to remain at sea, making money for these companies at personal cost. Shipping must be the only industry in the world where a 'management level' official- with a tonne of operational experience, to boot- plateaus professionally in his early thirties.

The battle is one sided, but it is still being waged all the time, overtly and covertly, by almost every small and large minion at many- even most- shipowning or shipmanagement companies today. (Shabby treatment of seafarers is a given in government setups like the MMD or DGS too, but for reasons more to do with misguided bureaucratic self-importance than commerce). 

The battle is waged when second rung clerks of often third-rate calibre are unleashed on crews at every interface with these body-shopping outfits. The overt battle has other weapons in its armoury when it comes to senior officers, who are more subtly made to feel inferior to their counterparts ashore, some of them ex-sailors now often unfit to sail for one reason or another. Officers will be often treated poorly at every stage of their interaction with the office, whether at sea or not. Even entry-level management trainees are treated much better ashore, especially in businesses with high attrition rates, but shipping must serve its hidden agenda; it must cut off its nose to spite its face. 

The aim is to make it clear- at every stage- that the 'office' is the boss, never mind that the office is a support setup for the ship and not the other way round. Never mind that the email was sent to the Master by a minor lackey in the office who wouldn't recognise a ship if it jumped up and bit him in the behind; that lackey expects his email to be given the same attention that one from the CEO would get. Senior management often backs his fallacious thinking. It is the principle of the thing, in this battle; reality has nothing to do with it. The unsaid principle is, devalue the sailor.  

The insidious, covert battle is usually more sophisticated, and seems to follow Goebbels's philosophy that if you tell a lie big enough and often enough then people will believe it. Although you have gems like, 'Indian seafarers are pricing themselves out of the market' (which they have been doing for thirty years, apparently, according to the propaganda machine- somebody should ask it how they thrived)- although you have these gems of misinformation, other propaganda is more whisper and innuendo than pronouncement. 

The notion that sailors enjoy high salaries is flawed to begin with. To compare, one must allow for the fact that- ashore- weekends, public holidays, employee's leave entitlement, medical leave etc mean that many employees work hardly seven months of the year. (104 days of weekends, 30 days leave a year, 10 days medical/casual leave and another dozen or more days of public holidays total to five months, give or take). A sailor, on the other hand, works anywhere from ten to twenty-four hours a day, sometimes (hang the rest period requirements, I am talking about reality here) around the clock. The pressures on him are tremendous, and not comparable to those of anybody in his organisation ashore. For a start, their lives are never on the line. Consider the fact that when a sailor does not work he is not paid, 'round the year wages paid' claims from some companies notwithstanding. Consider the years totally spent- and money spent, too- appearing for certificate of competency exams, or attending to emergencies at home. Or even company seminars. Unpaid.

Now do the math. You will find, as I do, that a senior officer's salary should be near double what it is today to be on par with middle management's ashore (this calculation is made to make all of you feel better, although I believe that a Master's wages should be in line with what is paid to senior management, not middle). The canard of 'high salaries at sea' is yet another example of pure and unadulterated drivel put out by the industry. 

Much of the whisper campaign will imply that all mariners today are of poor calibre and temperament and so not even comparable to clerical staff ashore. They will say that today all sailors are greedy, grubby and finicky about the smallest thing in the 'contract,' if that shady piece of one-sided paper can actually be called that. They will give you examples of seafarer 'demands', forgetting to mention that the negotiation of terms is hardly unique to shipping, and that unreasonableness is only when one demands things not in the contract. Unreasonableness lies more in the demands of body shoppers than those of mariners, in my experience.

These are just a few of those lies; I am sure all of us can think of many more. I used to be sometimes amused, sometimes annoyed- but always puzzled- at such malicious behaviour when I was sailing. Then I realised that this was not malice, but a hazily calculated attempt at trying to keep me down. Ex-mannning setups I worked with will tell you better whether they succeeded in this juvenile endeavour; I know I started having fun after I understood the game they were playing- very entertaining, it all was. One cannot and should not take children too seriously.

Today, I watch from the sidelines, sometimes anguished and sometimes angry, as this war damages the industry near-irretrievably. Thirty two year old Masters tell me why they are quitting. Young Second Mates talk to me with lesser composure and greater angst, but some of their reasons are similar to those of the seniors'.  Young cadets tell me why they will quit 'within five years'. And ratings look shell shocked, convinced that the choice they made- or that was made for them by family, in some cases- was absolutely the wrong one.
 

 There are many reasons why we cannot attract mariners of calibre today- or retain them long enough. Not all of them have to do with a war that we do not see. However, most of the reasons have a common undercurrent that guarantees that we do not attract or retain the kind of people we need. "We have better options elsewhere", prospective sailors and seafarers of all ranks are telling the industry today. "Besides, shipping does not need us anyway. Because if it did, it would not overwork and underpay us. It would illuminate a possible career path for the deserving amongst us. It wouldn't treat us like dirt." 

If I were honest, I would have to empathise with them as they take their money and run.
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