Thousands of Indian seafarers are trapped aboard vessels unable to move through the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most volatile waterways — as the tensions in the Iran war escalate.
Indian seafarers make up about 12% of the global maritime workforce. Recent estimates put the total number of Indian seafarers at over 300.000.
At least 22 Indian-flagged vessels have been stranded near the Strait of Hormuz for weeks caught between rising geopolitical tensions and growing maritime risk.
DW spoke to Captain Virendra Vishwakarma sailing on an LPG tanker in the Mina Saqr area. He has been stuck at sea for over two weeks. The ongoing Iran war has changed a routine journey for him into a daily struggle to stay safe.
“Right now the situation is bad,” Vishwakarma told DW.
He said the sailors on board his ship are facing missiles and drones everyday.
“It is very dangerous in the present scenario to sail on LPG ships within a war zone area, carrying 46 thousand metric tons of LPG. If something happened to the ship, you can understand the scenario. It will be chaotic,” he said, stressing that it would be a “big disaster”.
Some crews have reported dwindling supplies of food, fresh water, and fuel, with no clear timeline for safe passage. While back at home, their families wait anxiously, relying on patchy communication as the crisis deepens at sea.
“Every day my wife and my children come on the video call. I see their faces and they see my face. Every day they ask how are you father. How are you doing?…I don’t have an answer to these questions,” Vishwakarma told DW in an interview that kept cutting off due to the wobbly internet connection at sea.
Earlier this week, DW asked the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi what India was doing to support the seafarers.
This is what foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in response:
“We are also trying our best how best we can support them in terms of essentials, so on and so forth. Several seafarers have also come back. For example, the 15 seafarers, some of whom were injured, who were housed in Basra, they have come back to India or will be arriving in India shortly. Similarly, seafarers from other parts of that region have also been coming back. We have a dedicated control room in the Ministry of Shipping where all these questions of the families and all their concerns are being addressed.”
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