Although nearly 200 ships pass through Sri Lankan territorial waters daily, the country has done little to attract them to offer services, said Chairperson Institute of Charted Shipbrokers (ICS) Anoma Ranasinghe.
Speaking at convocation held in Colombo, organized by the Institute of Charted Shipbrokers Sri Lanka branch, she said that local maritime and logistics services need to be developed broadly and expansion of port services was also important.
“Therefore we must look at public, private partnerships and allow the private sector to be the driver with the government involved as a facilitator to develop the industry.
Due to the rapidly changing technology, we need to look at comprehensive range of maritime services such as ship management, ship financing, bunkering and bunker broking, marine insurance, ship broking, maritime legal services such as arbitration, litigation, ship arrest, maritime security, salvage & towage, off shore engineering need to be competitive with other maritime centers in the region. Chirperson Ranasinghe said the Ministry of Defense should give some advises to our shipping industry on matters related to human trafficking, migration, bribery and corruption, money laundering and also the most important Maritime Security.
“Our members of the institute are internationally recognized shipping professionals who work towards high professional ethical standards of trust. She also focused attention towards the development of a cruise terminal and the East container terminal expansion and the installation of gantry cranes.
The need of introducing maritime and logistics in school and university curricula as well as at the tertiary and vocational level education was also highlighted.
Ranasinghe, said it is important to have quality human capital to achieve the goal of developing our maritime industry and therefore we need to focus on training and skills development from the grassroots level.
She highlighted that the formulation of a new National Maritime and Logistics Policy is currently underway and the maritime security should be expanded to the maximum to protect our country’s vast area of coastline and territorial waters. The Chairperson also said that 2017 was significant to the Sri Lanka branch since during the thirty years of its existence the local Maritime Industry was able to groom shipping professionals.
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