Imagine a situation.
“ Onboard crew drinking condensate water and surviving on very little drinking water distributed everyday. Using seawater for daily routines and bathing. Eating expired food. No AC or fan, No Power, Invalid employment contracts, expired licences and Non payment of wages. Salary is not paid in many cases since last 18 months.”
Shocking, but true.In increasing number of cases, human degradation is so extreme it echoed the slavery we thought had been abolished more than a century ago.
ITF inspectors who visited these ship said.
"I am shocked to think that owners of these vessels treat their crews as slave labour.”
"In these modern times there is no excuse for crews to be treated this way."
In one case ITF inspector was shocked to see that the crew had been "locked in hatches" and "survived on what I can only describe as a starvation diet".
Report from the National Crime Agency (NCA) shows, there are as many as 13,000 victims of modern slavery in shipping industry.
Unpaid Crew in Cardiff, Unpaid Crew in Australia, Abandoned Crew in Scotland, Hanjin’s Crew Crisis, Mutiny in Indonesia, Bulker Crew Stranded of Georgia and the classic case of Seaman gaurd Ohio. The list is getting bigger and the phenomenon is spreading worldwide.
The Malaviya Seven,The Malaviya 20, Varun Shipping, Essar shipping, Pratibha shipping, Nautical Global,Liberty prrudencia , M.T. Sea Emperor etc. are the ships where Indians were the victims of slavery.
Some shipowners are continuing to profiteer at the expense of crew. In many cases, seafarers are disposable, treated as a commodity rather than human beings.
According to ITF
The sea is a largely unregulated environment whereby greedy ship owners and operators are allowed to get away with egregious breaches of human rights.
The sea has always been mysterious-what lurks in the deep waters is both amazing and fearsome, but today what is floating on its surface is increasingly sinister. Greed and a global oil price crisis are combining to create a new wave of slavery for which the chain of responsibility is long and complicated.
It’s also disappointing to see the reluctance of the P&I club to step up and pay out under the requirements that came into force in January this year under the amended Maritime Labour Convention, 2006.”
This is how authorities described the situation of an abandoned ship - “There’s 18 men on this ship. They’re hungry. They’re tired. They’re dirty. They want to get paid, and they want to go home,”
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