Remote digital invigilating mechanism utilised to ensure fairness and transparency
Demonstrating its transition to digitalisation, Union Minister for Ports, Shipping & Waterways, Shri Sonowal has unveiled the country’s remote competence examination for seafarers.
Materialising Maritime India Vision 2030
Minister Sonowal announced this initiative is focused on shipping development, ports seafarers training, and ultimately having India emerge as a leader in the maritime sector. He added this is part of the Prime Minister’s Maritime India Vision 2030 launched last March.
As one of the leading seafarers supplying countries, Minister Sonowal highlighted the Directorate General of Shipping took the initiative to conduct exhaustive research to study the issues related faced by seafarers. The project involved Indian National Shipowners’ Association and was funded by Maritime Training Trust. It covered more than 5,000 respondents including nearly 100 female seafarers.
The report, Navik Jeevan -A Survey on the life of Indian seafarers and Pre-sea students, highlighted some very important and critical issues seafarers face onboard. They included training, discrimination, harassment, fatigue, stress, motivation, happiness, safety, environment, working onboard, which warranted actions from shipping companies, maritime training institutes and the administration for improvements.
The Online Certificate of Competency Examination is an Artificial Intelligence powered online examination system, which uses remote proctoring and powerful security and surveillance tools to ensure a fair, transparent and secure examination system. This was developed to address the training aspect.
Director General of Shipping, Shri Amitabh Kumar said, “We are launching the first ever written examination for certificate of competency using a Remote Digital Proctoring mechanism, and certainly amongst the first in the world for any leading maritime nation to introduce such a system.” Dr Sanjeev Ranjan, Secretary Ports, Shipping and Waterways, added that one of the objectives of the Maritime India Vision 2030 was to ‘Digitise and upgrade Certificate of Competence (CoC) assessment mechanism of seafarers by 2022’, including End-End Digitisation of CoC assessment.
Crewing Online News Team
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