Scripting a New India

“Capt. Raj?”

“Speaking.”

“Hi, this is Capt Jagan here. How are you?”

“Oh Hi.” I had spoken to Jagan a couple of times before. He used to be the master of a VLCC when his ECDIS had a problem. Later he joined Essar office.

“I didn’t know you are a charged hydrographic surveyor,” he said with a laugh,

“How do you charge a surveyor by the way? Do you put a 220V through him?”

I laughed.


“We need your signature to authenticate a hydrographic survey that we have carried out.”

“For what?” I asked, “Are you submitting the survey to the HO?”

“No no. This is a requirement of the state maritime board.”

A week later one fine morning, all of a sudden I got a call from Jagan,

“Sorry for the short notice. Can you come to Hazira today?”

"How long does it take by taxi?” I asked.

“Five hours.”

Provided you had a top-end car and there was no traffic, which he forgot to tell me. It took me nine hours to muster a good car, grab an overnighter bag and reach the Essar office at Hazira. On the highway I found lots of construction going on. The Surat to Mumbai highway was going to become world-class.

”Kab tak ho jayega?” I asked the driver. Before the next monsoon he told me. Meanwhile my left hand was clutched on the handle bar and my right on my heart, as the fast car zoomed through the traffic. It was swerving in and out overtaking all kinds of trucks forming an endless line to Gujarat.

So there I was. Back in Essar. I had sailed in Essar ships ten years back. I felt I was back amongst familiar surroundings and known people.

Rao is the boss of that unit. An old timer who has been through the ups and downs of the company, many downs till this dizzying ‘up’ happened. He inherited the chair from a retired admiral who didn’t wait for the good times to come. Rao has a band of hard working people under him.

I knew Manoj from the Navy. Both of us were from the hydrographic branch. Jagan Lal is a workhorse. He has carried the hectic life of a ship during loading/discharging to this shore post. Somebody should tell him to relax. Unlike a ship which has a fixed tenure that ends after a few months, here on-shore life goes on and on and on… I was meeting these guys at a port terminal being built by Essar.

Hazira is, or till recently was, a god-forsaken place. Essar has an iron ore plant here where they make hot-bricketed iron (HBI). It has a market in the far-east – Japan, Korea and now increasingly to China. A new port is coming up here. Lot of infrastructure is being built. A new face of India is being scripted here.

On the other side of the road Essar has built a township. On land that had being reclaimed from the sea. I am not sure if ‘reclaimed’ is the right word. Because as Leslie Forbes wrote in ‘Bombay Ice’

“How do you reclaim something that was never yours in the first place?”

Nevertheless, from the swampy wastelands Essar has created Nand Niketan, a paradise of a place. There is greenery all around. The place is well planned and well managed. It has all amenities available such as play-grounds, swimming pool, schools, and shopping centers including a mall. So much so, that the 7000 fortunate residents hardly feel the need to go to the big city 18 kilometers away.

In the Essar office Jagan appeared a little pressurized. “What are your charges?”

I said “Look, I don’t know what the job is. Anyway, what is the hurry?”

Jagan got a little more pressurized.

“You have to simply put your signature and authenticate the survey.”

“For whose benefit?”

“For the benefit of the maritime board. They want a charge surveyor to authenticate the survey.”

Jagan mentioned a figure. I nodded my assent to his great relief.

The hydrographic surveyor from the maritime board came in. He was a chilled out fellow. It turned out we had served on the same ships. We knew many of the old timers from the branch. We got along well.

“Kabhi aaiye GMB mein. Main aapko wahan set kara doonga.”

I gave him my charming smile.

I was impressed by the developments Essar and its employees had wrought upon Gujarat. They are pumping funds in Jamnagar and Hazira. Transforming the non-descript places on the map into modern cities.

If somebody wants to see how infra-structure should be developed out of nothing they should visit these places.

Postscript – Some names have been changed to protect the identities.

Feedbacks

“We work hard and we play harder.”
‘When do you sleep?’ I asked.
“Isn’t that boring?”

At midnight my ex Navy friend, now well settled in Singapore, was taking us around in his spacious SUV. I was having trouble trying to keep my eyes open. According to that fellow Singaporeans found ‘sleeping’ a boring activity. The families sitting behind laughed.

On the roads there was quite a bit of traffic. Some pedestrians on the sidewalks. The scene outside resembled a normal evening in any of the cities around the world. But this was past midnight.

I was in Singapore to attend an ECDIS conference. The conference was well attended by shipping companies. This is the one group generally missing from seminars and conferences. As usual the main subject was IMO’s resolution to make ECDIS mandatory from 2012 onwards.

Whereas OEMs are enthusiastic about embracing every new technology that comes their way, ship-operators are more circumspect. Their attitudes towards new gizmos was summed up as:

"Keep looking out of the window because, When technology becomes your Master you can navigate faster to disaster.”

One shipping superintendent gave a realistic picture of how his company was dealing with ECDIS, digital charts, AIS, GMDSS and other peripheral developments that have invaded the bridge in the recent years.

The people who run the ship – Master, Chief, Second are not very highly educated. Most of them do not have a college degree. After school they do a few months of specialized training from an institute before joining the ship as a cadet. The real training begins then.

Without any formal degree deck officers are expected to grapple with the sophisticated equipment arraigned on the bridge. A guy is considered knowledgeable if he can master the operating manual of a fitted equipment. Most times the fellow memorizes the one page instruction sheet that is attached as a quick reference guide to the instrument. But then he is a practical fellow. Faced with operating a huge vessel in a real world where a moment’s lapse could result in a spectacular incident the OOW finds out all that is useful about the equipment from the point of view of running a ship.

My instinct says that OEMs who have developed a system in response to the industry feedback stand a better chance against those that have been developed by highly technical engineers and scientists ensconced in their cubicles but cut off from the real world.

C-Map digital charts was created purely from the point of view of the navigator. It was modeled according to the market response. It has succeeded despite there being no regulations forcing its usage. On the other hand the ENC is an IMO/IHO creation. Howsoever well-meaning they are but they have not catered for the user feedback. There are hardly any users to start with so where is the useful feedback?

S-57, S-63, ENC, SENC, RENC, WEND are all alien words to the bridge OOWs. Even today, at least in India, books on the subject haven’t yet penetrated to competency students. As such, students retain at most 10% of what is taught in the classroom. Rest of the knowledge comes from the field through practical usage. The majority of ships out there do not have ECDIS. The percentage of ships fitted with ECDIS hardware could be 10% or 5% or even less.

When the bridge OOW sees an ECDIS he doesn’t realize that as per the definition it would not qualify as a proper ECDIS. Maybe as an ECS, but not as an approved ECDIS. Truthfully speaking even a properly approved ECDIS might become an ECS without the knowledge of the user if the ENCs that he uses are not up-to-date. There would be no alarm because there is no specific definition for an up-to-date chart. Up-to-date as of when? A month, a fortnight, a week or a day? Even the hydrographic offices have not reached a consensus amongst themselves how often to issue corrections.

Back on the bridge the OOW doesn’t know (as yet) that he doesn’t have ENCs on board. Maybe raster charts or some other vector charts. So they learn to use ARCS, C-Map or Transas charts. Unfortunately for him the rules are ambiguous. SOLAS has a definition for the vector ENCs but is not clear about non-ENCs. In the absence of specific information some of them feel C-Map is ENCs.

“Isn’t it vector?”

Sealing the argument by implying that raster is non-standard and vector is better. And acceptable.

When some owners buy ENCs to go along with C-Map the OOWs realize that in certain parts of the world C-Map is far better than the ENCs.

Mariners talk amongst themselves. C-Map comes out tops mainly because it was there not because it was mandated but because it was useful. ENCs are considered heavy, complicated, time-consuming, difficult to select from chart catalogs and expensive. After all that unraveling of instructions and breaking your head the official charts turn out to be a damp squib.

The next few years are going to be interesting. Let’s see whether the seafarers who come under the SOLAS regime will get their choice of charts on the bridge.

The Trip to Singapore

I haven’t written for many days. I have a valid excuse for this. Family holiday at Singapore! The ECDIS conference along with some company training was conveniently thrown in.

It was a rare event for the family. One that happens probably once in five years or something. We realized it. We took in the sights knowing that those cherished images weren’t going to disappear from our memories soon.

A lot of planning went into the trip. A friend of a friend living in Singapore was traced. Isn’t his wife a homely person? How old was the daughter? The age of the daughter of the friend of a friend was a careful bit of information catered for in our meticulous plan.

So there we were at Changi airport. Two sheets of paper containing our itinerary was clutched tightly in my fist. They were already showing signs of wear and tear. Our trip was yet to begun.

‘What is the next step?’ Swipe some Singapore dollars. SGD 500 to be precise.

But where is that limo that the hotel promised?
“Did you ask for confirmation from the hotel?” asked my 22 year old son.
‘No, but I thought it was part of the deal.’

I got some accusing looks. “Nothing forms part of a deal till you confirm it”, he tells me sagely.

I swiped the card. Entered the memorized pin number. Which would soon be forgotten once the travel card got over.

‘Joy, here’s your 50 dollars. Be careful. I want an account before you get the next 25.’
‘I suggest we take a taxi to the hotel. Not the Chrysler one though.’

The family heaved a sigh of relief. Though willing, but lugging the heavy bags on an MRT or a bus was a daunting prospect.

The trip to the hotel was nice. Very nice. The hotel was nicer. Going up to the 32nd floor on a lift through which we could see the Singapore skyline was wonderful.

The week passed like a dream. We had a lovely holiday.

“Dad, when will our country ever become like this?”

I thought hard about it. I listed out a few things which, in my personal opinion, as countrymen we must admit to ourselves honestly and do something about it.

- Sanitation. And by extension plumbing.

Till our country learnt proper hygiene, cleanliness and sanitation we will continue to spoil the countryside with open-air toilets. Similarly we needed good plumbing. We have good plumbers. Unfortunately these guys emigrate to Dubai and probably Singapore where they get a better price for their skills.

We must slot the plumbers and sanitation workers higher up in our social status. This is not so much of an infrastructure problem, more of a social kind.

As long as we tolerated the lôtă and the field toilets we remained doomed to our squalid fate.

- Bureaucracy.

A government servant by definition is exactly what it says - a servant. Available for service to the public and not the other way around. When the government employees are elevated to become masters of the masses, when we give them the highest social status then we pay a price for it. How come these guys enjoy special privileges that a common citizen doesn’t? For example some of them sport different-colored blinking lights which goes with a blaring horn to pierce through the mad traffic. Come to think of it. The traffic got worse only because those administrators who were supposed to address this issue were merrily roaming around with multi-colored contraptions fitted on top of their car. How come we never noticed, albeit in our short stay at Singapore, no such traffic-piercing vehicles?

I despair what damage job-reservations in the government for the under-privileged must have done to the country. It implies that the government jobs are goodies to be shared with the have-nots. Rather than making the entry harder so that the most committed would strive for a government job, it has become a piece of pie which can be manipulated to be obtained for oneself.

It makes me feel we are doomed for a few more centuries till we clear up this particular mess in our country.

- Air Quality (As also Water Purity).

We are prone to burning things. After all it is ordained in our ancient culture. We forget that in the olden days burning was a sort of purifying process against the forest all around and the forest-insects.

Today we have burnt away a good piece of our beautiful country in the name of purification.

Take any ceremony or any rite and we burn wood and ghee. A havan in a marriage is a must. Even cremation by burning logs for that matter. Burning degrades the air around us. I am not even talking about global-warming.

I am concerned about the everyday practice of lighting fires in our cities. Burning a garbage-heap doesn’t make it disappear. Instead of the garbage being gathered in one place it has only spread more effectively around the neighborhood.

Similarly the practice of spoiling the water bodies through visarjan and other such ceremonial acts. It is such an irritating thing to watch people throw a plastic packet containing dead flowers into a river or a pond and then pray for salvation or whatever.