Before 1927, India had no school that trained officers for merchant ships. In March 1926, the Central Government accepted a resolution to start this training. Sir P. S. Sivaswamy Iyer had asked for it for several years. The Department of Commerce then took over the Dufferin, a troopship of the Royal Indian Marine, and converted her into a training ship.
The Dufferin was built at Barrow-in-Furness in England and launched in 1904. She reached Bombay in 1905 and served as a troopship until the 1920s. As the Indian Mercantile Marine Training Ship Dufferin, she stayed at Bombay and became a floating school.
The first cadets joined at the end of 1927. The sources do not agree on the numbers. The Directorate General of Shipping gives a first batch of 50 nautical cadets. An IMU annual report gives 26 cadets on 5 December 1927. The course was three years long.
In 1935 the Dufferin started to train marine engineers. From then on, each batch had 25 nautical cadets and 25 engineering cadets.
After independence, the Government set up the Merchant Navy Officers Training Committee in 1947. It planned to move engineer training ashore. In 1949 the engineering cadets left the ship for the new Directorate of Marine Engineering Training (DMET), with a head office in Calcutta and a branch in Bombay. The Dufferin continued to train deck officers.
The ship was decommissioned in April 1972. One account says that she trained more than 2,600 officers between 1927 and 1972. The training ship Rajendra took over from 1972 to 1993. In 1993, deck training moved ashore to T.S. Chanakya at Nerul, Navi Mumbai.
DMET and MERI alumni trace their training back to the engineering cadets who studied on her from 1935. The first of them were at sea before independence.
