DGS Order No. 3 of 2026 makes placement records worth 55% of an institute's overall grade — and requires every MTI to display that grade publicly. Here's what the order says, why the 12-month placement figure matters more than the total, and the six checks worth running before you enrol.
If you or your child are about to spend two years and several lakhs of rupees on a pre-sea maritime course, one document decides how much of that investment will actually reach a ship. It is DGS Order No. 3 of 2026, issued on 20 March 2026, and almost no prospective cadet has read it.
You don't need to read all nineteen pages either. But you do need to understand what it says about placement — because it hands you, for the first time in this level of detail, a legally-backed way to evaluate a Maritime Training Institute (MTI) before you enrol. The catch: only if you know what to check.
What the Comprehensive Inspection Programme actually is
Every DGS-approved MTI in India is now inspected under a single framework called the Comprehensive Inspection Programme (CIP). It replaces three separate CIPs that ran previously — one each for pre-sea, competency, and modular courses. Inspection is carried out either by a Recognized Organization (a Classification Society approved by the Government of India) or by the jurisdictional Mercantile Marine Department (MMD), on a three-year cycle: one initial inspection plus two annual verifications.
At the end of the process, the MTI is assigned a grade on a six-point scale:
| Grade | Score | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 90% and above | Excellent |
| A2 | 80% – 89.99% | Very Good |
| B1 | 70% – 79.99% | Good |
| B2 | 60% – 69.99% | Average |
| C1 | 50% – 59.99% | Below Average |
| C2 | Below 50% | Poor — continuation of approval to be reviewed |
That grade is what should appear on the institute's website and its printed advertisements. More on that in a moment.
Why the grade is mostly a placement grade
Under Order No. 3 of 2026, the placement-records section of the inspection checklist is worth 6,000 out of 11,000 total marks — roughly 55% of an MTI's overall grade. This is up from 5,000 out of 10,000 under the previous framework. The order text calls this out explicitly.
Read that number again. More than half of an institute's grade is determined by whether its students actually reached a ship after passing the final exam. Faculty quality, infrastructure, campus amenities, library, hostels, curriculum, discipline — all the things a glossy brochure emphasises — together account for less than 45% of the grade.
The practical implication: an MTI's CIP grade is, first and foremost, a signal about placement. Nothing else moves the needle nearly as much.
What "placement" specifically means
This is where a lot of marketing language falls apart. The order defines placement precisely: a trainee is "placed" only when a valid sign-on date appears against their name on the DGS e-governance system — evidence that they physically joined a ship for their shipboard training.
An offer letter is not placement. A sponsorship agreement is not placement. A "job assured" line in a brochure is not placement. A conditional letter promising a berth "subject to vessel availability" is not placement. Only a recorded sign-on date is.
Once you are enrolled, you will have your own DGS e-governance profile through which you can verify entries against your own name. Prospective students without a profile cannot audit the raw sign-on data — which is precisely why the aggregated grade the MTI is required to display matters so much.
The two windows — and why you should ask for both figures separately
The order tracks placement over two windows from the date a trainee passes the final exam:
- Within 12 months — worth up to 4,000 marks.
- Between 12 and 24 months — worth up to 1,000 marks.
The 12-month window is worth four times more than the 12–24-month window. This weighting is deliberate: DGS considers a trainee placed within a year of passing the pre-sea course to be the honest measure of an MTI's placement pipeline. Trainees placed only after twelve to twenty-four months of waiting count for something, but far less.
So when you ask an institute for their placement figures, ask specifically:
- What percentage of your last two passed-out batches were placed onboard within 12 months?
- What percentage were placed between 12 and 24 months?
An institute that gives you only a combined figure is telling you less than it looks. A 90% "overall placement" number can hide the fact that most of it came in the second year — during which the student was carrying the cost of the pre-sea course with no income and no CoC pathway progressing.
The 5% alternate-career carve-out
The order allows institutes to count up to 5% of a batch as "placed" if those students opted for a different path — higher studies, the armed forces, or an unrelated career — provided the MTI can produce supporting documents.
This isn't a loophole in itself. It exists because it would be unfair to penalise an institute for a student's genuinely voluntary choice. But it does mean that a 100% placement claim may include this 5% carve-out. Worth asking: of the placement number you're being quoted, how many students are the alternate-career category?
The public-display rule — and why it has teeth
This is the provision most cadets don't know about, and it is the single most useful thing in the order for someone still choosing an institute.
Under paragraph 8, an MTI must permanently display its current CIP grade on its website and in every print advertisement it publishes — in the same font, colour, and size as any DGS approval claim it makes. If the brochure prominently says "DGS Approved", the CIP grade must sit next to that phrase in matching typography.
Non-compliance is officially treated as a breach of the code of ethics. The practical enforcement mechanism: DGS can freeze the institute's batch uploads on the e-governance portal, which effectively halts operations without needing a court process.
For you as a prospective student, the implication is direct: an MTI making DGS approval claims on its website or brochures without displaying its current CIP grade in matching prominence is already in breach of the disclosure rule. That is a red flag before you even look at the grade itself.
The new-MTI trap
If an institute has recently been approved by DGS and is recruiting for its first or second batch, understand what the order says about newly-established MTIs (paragraph 6.4): no grade shall be awarded until either all trainees of the first batch have been placed onboard, or 24 months from the passing-out date of that first batch, whichever comes first.
This means a genuinely new MTI has no CIP grade — not because it is being unfairly withheld, but because there is no track record yet to grade. Which in turn means:
- "Newly DGS-approved" is neutral information, not a positive signal.
- A brand-new MTI cannot honestly quote a placement percentage. Any figure quoted at this stage is speculation, not verified performance.
- The order also prohibits new MTIs from enhancing batch size or starting new pre-sea courses until this first-batch milestone is cleared.
If you are considering a first-batch or second-batch enrolment, you are underwriting the institute's placement pipeline as much as they are underwriting your training.
The batch-enhancement gate — reading the signal in the opposite direction
Paragraph 5.16 sets the rule for existing MTIs that want to increase their intake capacity: batch enhancement is allowed only if the MTI is graded A1 or A2 AND shows minimum 85% placement for each approved batch.
This has a useful inverse reading. If an institute is aggressively expanding intake year on year, it is signalling — under the order's own criteria — that it holds an A1 or A2 grade and meets the 85% placement threshold. If it is quietly maintaining or reducing intake, that may signal the opposite.
This isn't a foolproof indicator. An institute might choose to keep batch sizes small for genuinely quality-focused reasons. But it is one more data point worth asking about.
What to actually do before you enrol
Six checks, in the order they make sense to run:
- Find the MTI's current CIP grade on their website homepage or admissions page. If DGS approval is claimed anywhere, the grade must be displayed with it. If it isn't, that is itself the finding.
- For GP Rating and certain other courses, cross-check the claimed grade against DGS's published performance data on the official portal. For courses where DGS publishes institute-level performance separately, discrepancies between what the MTI claims and what DGS publishes are decisive.
- Ask for the 12-month placement figure for the last two passed-out batches, in writing. Not the combined figure. Not the "overall placement". The 12-month figure, separately.
- Ask what percentage of that placement figure is the alternate-career category. A responsible institute will give you the number.
- Verify the institute is not new. If the first batch has not yet passed out, or has passed out but is under 24 months old, there is no grade to check — and no verifiable placement claim to be made.
- If no grade is displayed anywhere, walk. An institute either in breach of the disclosure rule, or unwilling to publish its own performance, has told you what you need to know.
None of this replaces speaking to recent graduates and looking at the physical infrastructure. But it does mean that the first filter — before campus visits, before fee discussions, before sponsorship conversations — can be done in fifteen minutes from your phone.
The wider point
DGS Order No. 3 of 2026 doesn't fix everything wrong with maritime training in India. It doesn't guarantee that every graded institute is honest, or that every A1 grade is deserved. What it does do is create a formal accountability trail — a grade, a public-display requirement, and enforcement teeth — that didn't exist in this integrated form before.
For a student and their family, the order is only as useful as your willingness to ask the awkward question early. Which is: show me your grade, show me your 12-month placement, show me your last two batches.
Any institute worth your two years will answer.
Related reading:
An institute can be approved for one course and not approved for another. Always verify the specific course approval before paying any fees.
- 1Verify the instituteCheck that the institute appears in the DGS-approved list.
- 2Verify the courseConfirm the specific course is approved at that institute.
- 3Check expiry and placementConfirm the approval has not lapsed and that the institute offers placement.
- 4Check RPSL if placement promisedIf the institute promises sea-time placement, verify their RPSL licence.