Sagar Samman Award- Recognition of Outstanding Maritime Training Institutes(SSA-ROMTI)

Overview

About SSA-ROMTI

This recognition goes to the academy, never to the cadet inside it. The nominee is a maritime training institute already approved by the Directorate General of Shipping, and a cadet, a rating trainee or a serving officer has nothing to fill in. A search for a merchant navy scholarship lands here by accident: what is on offer is a rank for the institute, not a rupee for its intake.

It is one of nine categories of Sagar Samman Award set out in the scheme guidelines, alongside the Varuna Award, the Award for Excellence, the Award for Gallantry and the rankings for ship-owning companies, employers of seafarers, ports and terminals. The awards are conferred each year under the National Maritime Day Celebrations (Central) Committee, a society registered in February 1989 whose stated objects include recognising the services of seafarers and of others who develop national shipping, as recorded in the Sagar Samman Awards guidelines.

There is still a reason for an aspiring seafarer to keep reading. The ranking is not decided by a jury reading essays: it is settled on the institute's score in the Comprehensive Inspection Programme, the same inspection whose grades the maritime regulator publishes, institute by institute, for every academy it inspected. The evidence the committee weighs is evidence a family comparing two academies can read first.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The calendar is fixed by the guidelines rather than announced afresh each year. The Member Secretary issues the call for nominations by the last week of January, nominations close on 28 February, the Evaluation Committee's minutes reach the Chairperson by 15 March, and the names of the winners are announced by 21 March, per the Sagar Samman Awards guidelines. Conferment follows at the National Maritime Day function.

National Maritime Day falls on 5 April, marking the maiden voyage of the SS Loyalty from Bombay to London on 5 April 1919, per the Press Information Bureau. Merchant Navy Week is observed around it: the Committee proposed 30 March to 5 April for the 2026 observance, in its nomination circular to approved institutes.

The most recent cycle ran to the 63rd National Maritime Day, whose main function the Committee fixed for 5 April 2026 and for which it sought nominations covering the preceding calendar year, in its nomination circular to approved institutes. That round has closed, and no fresh call has been published since. On the guidelines' own schedule the next invitation is due in the last week of January, with nominations closing at the end of February. The scheme listing publishes neither an opening nor a closing date, so the fact that it stays up says nothing about whether the window is. What opens a round is the Member Secretary's letter to approved institutes, and nothing else does.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Only a DGS-approved maritime training institute can be nominated, and only in one of three defined groups: pre-sea institutes running courses for officer cadets in nautical and engineering streams, pre-sea institutes running courses for rating trainees, and post-sea institutes running competency courses. An institute outside that approval, or running only modular short courses, has no route in. Having been through the Comprehensive Inspection Programme is less a separate hurdle than the whole examination, because assessment is made on the institute's overall CIP score for its category and an academy never inspected has nothing to be judged on.

The scheme record that carries this award files its beneficiary as an individual, and that one word is what misroutes school-leavers to the page. The eligibility text in the same record settles it the other way: every line of it describes an approved institute, and the official application format has no field for a candidate's name, marks or family income.

The eligible pool is small and countable. As on 2025 there were 176 DGS-approved maritime training institutes in India, of which 162 were operational and 14 suspended or closed, per the Comprehensive Inspection Programme Report 2025 published by the Training Branch. Of the operational institutes, 36 ran pre-sea courses only, 81 ran post-sea courses only and 35 ran both.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Three conditions end a nomination, and none of them is a category bar. An application that reaches the committee incomplete, incorrect, unclear or illegible is liable to be rejected summarily, so a missing annexure is fatal rather than curable. An award found to have been conferred on a false or fraudulent declaration is revoked, and the applicant is permanently debarred from any such award in future. And where the committee finds no nominee suitable in a given year, the award simply is not conferred that year, which means a category can go empty rather than be filled by the best of a weak field.

One bar in the guidelines does not reach this category. No serving government officer may be considered for any award, a restriction aimed at the individual honours rather than at an institution's authorised signatory, per the same guidelines.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

An academy holds this rank for the year it was declared and no longer. Each cycle is judged on data drawn from the immediately preceding calendar year, so an institute that took first place has to be nominated again, and inspected again, before it can claim the position twice. That is why the recognition is always cited with a year attached rather than as a standing status.

There is also no waiting period to sit out. The five year cooling-off written into the guidelines applies to the Varuna Award and the Award for Excellence, both individual honours, and is not written against the institute rankings, which carry no bar on being ranked in consecutive years. What does have a clock is the underlying inspection: a Comprehensive Inspection Programme certificate may run for a maximum of three years and only while annual inspections continue within the window set by DGS Order No. 3 of 2026, and a missed inspection can invalidate every certificate an institute holds, per the inspection report.

What you get

Award & benefits

The guidelines provide for formal recognition of three institutes in each of the three categories, placed in an inter-se ranking and declared on the occasion of National Maritime Day. That is the whole of the prize: no cash component, no tuition subsidy and no student-facing benefit is attached to it anywhere in the scheme documents.

The contrast with the individual awards is instructive about what an institute actually receives. Under the same guidelines the Varuna Award carries a statue of Lord Varuna and a citation, the Award for Excellence a ship model and a citation, and the Gallantry award a trophy and a citation, with individual medals where more than one seafarer was involved. For the training institute category the guidelines specify the ranking and the public declaration, and stop there.

In practice the value shows up in how institutes use it. Anglo-Eastern Maritime Academy lists a first rank under this recognition on its own awards page, which is the form the benefit usually takes: a line in a prospectus, backed by an inspection score.

• Formal national-level recognition to top 3 institutes in each category.
• Inter-se ranking to determine 1st, 2nd, and 3rd positions.
• Public acknowledgment during National Maritime Day celebrations.
• Enhanced institutional reputation and credibility.

What to prepare

Documents required

The application format is short and almost entirely evidential. An institute states its name, address and contact details, its category of training institute, the date it first received DGS approval, and the list of maritime training courses it offers.

Two attachments carry the weight. The institute encloses self-attested Comprehensive Inspection Programme score sheets for the last three years, and a self-certification that nothing adverse has been established against it on record during the same three years. Both are marked in the format itself as being open to verification against DGS records, so a flattering copy is checked against the regulator's own file. Every nomination also carries a declaration-cum-undertaking that the entity has read the guidelines and accepts the Evaluation Committee's decision as final and binding.

Listings of this award tend to advertise a longer shopping list than that: accreditation papers, faculty files, infrastructure details, placement registers. Those are the things the inspection itself goes through on site. What the nomination hands over is the score they produced, not the files behind it.

Step by step

How to apply

The nomination goes by email to the National Maritime Day Celebrations (Central) Committee, and it does not go through the national awards portal. This is the single most common wrong turn on this scheme. A circular issued by the Committee announced an online module on the Rashtriya Puraskar Portal at awards.gov.in but restricted it, on the direction of the Ministry of Home Affairs, to the Varuna, Excellence and Gallantry awards; the same circular states that nominations for recognition of outstanding maritime entities, maritime training institutes among them, shall be sent to the Member Secretary at nmdc-dgs@nic.in, in the online module circular. A myScheme listing that records the application mode as online, with the national awards portal as the official website, is describing the portal-based half of the scheme family rather than this category.

Nominations are submitted electronically as duly signed and scanned copies of the application and its attachments. Any entity may nominate, and an institute may put itself forward through its authorised signatory; the two-seconder requirement in the guidelines is written for self-nominating natural persons, not for an academy or a company.

Where the scheme is thinnest is in telling a nominating academy what has become of its email. Real-time notification and tracking of application status are advertised as features of the portal module, and the module covers only the three individual awards, so the institutes sent down the email route inherit none of it. No acknowledgement number comes back, and nothing is published between the closing date and the declaration. An institute that wants confirmation its papers arrived has to ask the Member Secretary's office directly; the result itself surfaces when the Director General declares the final list.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Assessment rests on one number: the institute's overall score in the Comprehensive Inspection Programme for its category. The programme was introduced by DGS Order No. 25 of 2013, and the guidelines hand the inspecting to Recognised Organisations and classification societies rather than to the awarding committee, which is what lets a single score stand in for a jury's judgement. Most of it is genuinely outside the regulator: of the 112 CIP inspections carried out during 2025, the regulator's own Mercantile Marine Departments conducted 5, while DNV alone conducted 44 and the balance went to IRS, Lloyd's Register, ClassNK and Bureau Veritas, per the inspection report.

For a pre-sea institute the score sheet runs to 10000 credit points, and half of it is placement. Placement for shipboard training alone carries 5000 points, or 50 percent. Infrastructure and management together account for 2500 points, or 25 percent, split between infrastructure facility, maintenance and ambience at 1500 points, student intake quality at 500 and overall performance and management at 500. Quality of education and training accounts for the remaining 2500 points, being faculty and human resource development at 1500 and student development programmes at 1000, as set out in the guidelines.

That weighting is not an accident of drafting. The regulator has recorded that several institutes admitted more candidates than they could support with onboard training berths, leaving a backlog of trainees who finished pre-sea training without being helped into the mandatory shipboard berth, and it has warned that institutes in the lowest grade bands have shown poor shipboard placement records that may damage their trainees' employability, in the inspection report. A ranking that puts half its marks on getting cadets to sea is measuring the thing most likely to go wrong.

The post-sea sheet is built differently, totalling 2500 points with faculty and human resource development weighted heaviest at 1000 points, or 40 percent, and infrastructure set-up, student performance and overall management taking 500 points each, in the same guidelines.

Grades follow a fixed band, and this is the table worth reading before choosing an academy.

Nominations then go to an Evaluation Committee of 3 to 5 experts, drawn mostly from officers of the rank of Additional Secretary and above and constituted afresh each year under the guidelines. The committee records its recommendations as formal minutes, and the Director General declares the final list of awardees.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The Evaluation Committee's decision is final and binding, and every nominating entity signs an undertaking accepting that before its papers are considered. Data submitted must relate to the immediately preceding calendar year, so a strong record from three years ago does not count towards the current cycle.

Two further conditions shape the outcome more than institutes expect. Where no nomination is received in a category, the Committee may consider a suitable nomination of its own motion, for reasons recorded in writing, which means a category can be filled without anyone having applied. And a nomination that fails in one year is not extinguished: the nominee may be considered again in a later year on a fresh application.

Get help

Contact

Nominations and queries go to the Member Secretary, National Maritime Day Celebrations (Central) Committee, at nmdc-dgs@nic.in. The Committee sits at the office of the maritime regulator, on the 9th Floor of the Beta Building, i-Think Techno Campus, Kanjurmarg (East), Mumbai 400 042, per the regulator's contact page.

One naming change is worth carrying into any correspondence. The Directorate General of Shipping now operates as the Directorate General of Maritime Administration and publishes at dgma.gov.in, while the scheme documents, the approval certificates and the inspection programme all continue to use the older name. Questions specifically about an institute's inspection grade belong with the Training Branch, which publishes the reports at its CIP grade page.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

Explore more

Related scholarships

References

Sources