That morning, Abdur Rahaman Mondal thought he would be dead. Swallowed by the deep, dark waters of the Strait of Hormuz, his home in Mirjapur village, in Nadia district of West Bengal, more distant than ever. “All I could think of were the faces of my ageing parents, wife and sisters. I felt I would never be able to see them again,” says the 27-year-old. An Able Seaman, Mondal was on board a Palau-flagged oil tanker that was hit by an Iran-fired missile while passing through the Strait of Hormuz on March 1.

Days later, Electro-Technical Officer Vineet Sharma, 28, crossed the same waters, his ship headed for India, fully loaded with oil from an Iranian port. “Luckily for us, it was a peaceful passage through the Strait, but the stress was immense. We had many briefings preparing us for that voyage. We were on constant alert, and could not relax for even a few minutes. Back home, our families waited for our call all day,” says Sharma, who is from a village near Nainital, where his father is a postmaster.

With the Strait of Hormuz set to open after months of hostilities in West Asia as part of a long-awaited deal between Iran and the US, traffic will finally resume on one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. On board many of the ships that sail out will be Indians, among the largest contingent of sailors worldwide.

With 3.08 lakh sailors as of 2024, India ranks among the top three global suppliers of maritime personnel, alongside the Philippines and China, holding approximately 17% of global crew share. Today, nearly one in five seafarers worldwide is Indian.

During the recent war, 13 India-flagged vessels, with close to 550 Indian sailors aboard, were stuck in the Strait of Hormuz for more than 100 days. Across the broader Gulf region, more than 18,000 Indian seafarers were caught in the uncertainty.

For long, the Merchant Navy was seen as a well-paid, even glamorous, career. The loneliness, the psychological weight of being at sea for months, the isolation, these stayed aboard. So did the risks. Storms, accidents, piracy — and now, in the night waters of the Persian Gulf, the dread of a loitering munition dropping onto a loaded oil tanker and a full crew.

Yet, across India’s cities and small towns, thousands continue to sign up for a career in the Merchant Navy.

Preparing for the sea

The Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies (SIMS) in Lonavala, one of India’s premier maritime academies, sits in serenity, with sculpted lawns and enormous trees that canopy a glass-fronted main building. Walk far enough and the real purpose announces itself: a full-scale replica of a ship’s aft, or the rear section, rises from the green — all steel and impressive.

This is the beating heart of the institute that prepares 390 cadets for a world considerably more challenging than the brochure suggests.

The institute offers four programmes: a one-year DNS (Deck Navigation Science), a one-year GME (Graduate Marine Engineering), a BTech in Marine Engineering, and an ETO (Electro-Technical Officer) course. The postgraduate courses, particularly GME, which requires a mechanical engineering background, have seen a sharp drop in demand, but undergraduate programmes tell a very encouraging story, says SIMS Vice-Principal Captain Subhendu Hati.

“Two years ago, the unified IMU-CET entrance test conducted by the Indian Maritime University drew 39,000 applicants. Last year, there were 55,000 and this year, 72,000. Most of our cadets come from tier-2 cities, small towns and even rural areas,” says Hati.

The Lonavala-Karjat belt is home to some of the country’s best maritime institutes — besides SIMS, Anglo-Eastern, Great Eastern and Tolani. Most of these institutes are run by shipping companies that eventually employ the cadets on their ships. SIMS, for instance, is run by Executive Ship Management. “Our cadets have guaranteed placements on our own ships. In fact our intake usually depends on our requirements,” says Hati.

On the SIMS campus, amid the rigorous daily routine of academics and practical training from 5.30 am to 10.30 pm, the dangers of war and the recent casualties have quietly crept into daily conversations.

“The war comes up constantly. Our faculty share their experiences, it becomes part of the preparation. But none of it has made us regret our decision,” says Oren Pacheco, a 20-year-old cadet from Goa.

For Pacheco, the sea is an inheritance — his family on both sides worked on ships, mainly in the galley or kitchen. At 11, standing on a bridge at Marmagao Port in Goa, where his father’s ship had docked for some days, he had decided he would do the same. Now studying for his Diploma in Nautical Sciences at SIMS, Pacheco discusses drone strikes and stranded tankers the way his father’s generation discussed monsoons.

Jeeva Bharati, 23, from Chennai, graduates in two months. The first in his family to go to sea, he turned down desk jobs for a maritime career. Asked about sailing through active conflict zones, he says with pragmatism, “Tankers pay more… The war is a hurdle. We’ll overcome it soon.”

Of the 390 cadets at SIMS, 19 are women. They come here, raring to prove something beyond seamanship. Kheta Patel, 19, from Gujarat, says she was in Class 8, when she decided she wanted a life in uniform, a call that meant standing up to her parents. When she couldn’t get into the National Defence Academy, she walked into the Merchant Navy. “Working with machines is challenging, but girls can do it too. It is possible.”

This is what Kheta’s teacher Captain Rajwinder Kaur, who retired as a Master, told herself when she joined the Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) in 2005.

Recalling her days aboard, she says she had to constantly prove her capability to her male counterparts, especially when it came to physical work like picking up the ropes, tying the ship or working long hours at the port. Dealing with isolation was tough, too. Before Internet connectivity reached ships, communication meant expensive satellite calls from the ship. Between those calls, her parents waited and worried, she says, adding that her male colleagues rarely carried that same emotional weight.

👁 1 in 5 sailors worldwide is Indian: What draws them to the deep sea

Ex-Chief Engineer Makrand Date, who teaches engineering subjects at SIMS, believes today’s cadets are better prepared than his generation. “What I prepare them for is the mental and physical toughness this career demands,” says Date, who survived a pirate attack during his sailing days.

Merchant shipping, he adds, isn’t usually a wartime target. “A merchant vessel operates like a Red Cross convoy — it carries no allegiance. That confidence is something I pass on to my cadets,” he says.

Recalling her encounter with danger in 1999, Date says, “While serving as a Fourth Engineer, my ship experienced what the industry calls an ‘armed robbery’ — distinct from hijacking, but no less alarming. It happened in Brazil, while the vessel was at the port. The attackers — local seafarers, disguised and carrying guns and knives —boarded during a watch changeover around midnight, took money and valuables from the Captain and fled. Even now, more than two decades later, I remember the sequence of events that night.”

Chirag Bahri calls his experience “life-changing”. In April 2010, as a 28-year-old marine engineer, Bahri boarded the chemical tanker MV Marida Marguerite, bound for Belgium from Kandla, Gujarat. On May 8, 2010, as the ship crossed the Gulf of Aden, pirates boarded the vessel. Bahri, working in the engine room, was called to the bridge of the ship, where he found an AK-47 pointed at his forehead. For the next eight months, the crew were held hostage and tortured. In December 2010, the company paid $5.5 million and Bahri returned to Delhi on January 7, 2011. Despite the trauma, he briefly returned to the sea, before dedicating himself to the International Seafarers Welfare and Assistance Network.

At sea, the weather can be treacherous. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Master Mariner recalls that while loading in Greenland, they received a message that the ice was closing, which would have meant the ship jamming on shore for months. They swiftly sailed out only to hit an iceberg a few miles away. “As water started to pour inside, the entire crew was on deck trying to stop that. The nearest port was a day away. We managed to reach there, but everyone aged 10 years that one day,” he says.

Navigating war zones

As they factor in newer challenges, academies nationwide are rewriting their curricula, with safety training now covering how to navigate active war zones.

At the 116-year-old T S Rehman, a maritime institute at Nhave near Mumbai, where close to 700 officers and Ratings (non-officers or hands-on operational, technical crew) train round the year, the routine has quietly shifted: for three months now, Saturday lectures have moved to war discussions.

“We discuss case studies from the war zone that shipping companies send us, update cadets on armed guards and their roles, how to mitigate risks, and on their insurance and medical cover. There’s a psychologist on campus, and many of us on the faculty share our own experiences,” says Captain Ashutosh Apankar, the principal.

Institutes also rely on simulation to prepare seafarers for drone and missile attacks. One scenario, for instance, simulates a Shahed-136 loitering munition attack at 2 am, giving the candidate 90 seconds to communicate the emergency, manage crew panic, and decide on evasive action, while biometrics track heart rate, eye movement, decision latency, and voice stress.

Companies are responding too. Maersk and others have introduced dedicated apps and WhatsApp groups to keep families updated when vessels enter affected areas or crew communications are paused for operational security.

The future of the ocean

While the demand for seafarers is rising, with India driving much of that growth, recruitment isn’t keeping pace, says Captain Sanjay Parashar, former Master Mariner and CEO, VR Maritime Services Pvt. Ltd., which today manages crew for over 200 ships.

India has nearly 12,000 active captains against a demand of 25,000–40,000.

“The Merchant Navy offers extraordinary pay but demands physical presence, extended separation, and hardship far from land — things this generation is increasingly reluctant to give. Those still joining come either because they are passionate or are from smaller towns, where seafaring salaries still outweigh the pull of city life,” says Parashar, who was also a member of the National Shipping Board.

Cadets start at salaries of around Rs 40,000 a month, junior engineers get around Rs 1 lakh. Within a decade, a senior officer earns Rs 10-15 lakh a month; at career peak, a Master or Chief Engineer commands Rs 10-20 lakh a month. Industry experts say LNG carriers, chemical tankers, and gas carriers pay the highest salaries.

The geography of Indian seafaring is equally revealing. Parashar says 90% of Ratings come from villages in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and coastal pockets near Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu. “In households earning $100 a month, a Rating’s $2,000 salary transforms not just one life but a whole family’s standing,” he says.

Close to 50,000 Indians are employed on cruise or passenger ships annually, with a notable proportion of them women, particularly from Manipur.

As the number of Indian seafarers has increased more than five-fold over the past one-and-a-half decades, from 62,267 in 2010 to 3.07 lakh in 2024, the workforce composition has shifted distinctly towards non-officers, with more Ratings joining ships, according to data maintained by the Directorate General of Shipping.

But the profession hides a deeper, darker shadow. Seafarers desperate for work take contracts on vessels across West Africa and the Gulf, where ownership is deliberately opaque, with ships sailing under the dubious Flags of Convenience. When owners vanish and insurance lapses, Indian cadets are invariably the ones left stranded. India accounts for 18% of global seafarer abandonments or sailors being abandoned by ship owners.

Back in Lonavala, the light is fading over the ship’s replica, steel catching the last of the sun. Inside, a drill is underway — alarms, instructions, the rehearsed choreography of calm under pressure.

In a few months, for cadets like Pacheco and Bharati, drills like this one will stop being simulations. The sea has always asked for courage, and now it is asking for some more.

With inputs from Purnima Sah, Mumbai, and Jay Mazoomdar, Delhi