A plunge into a unique world of divers maintaining oil rigs and pipelines

Where would you least expect a Punjabi or a Haryanvi or a Rajasthani lad? And making big bucks, too? Read on to find out

We have all seen pictures of oil tankers. We have all seen pictures of oil rigs in the middle of the sea. And we have all seen pictures of oil underwater pipelines. We have seen movies about all three, which are usually about disasters

or hijacking.

But how many of us paused to think about the people who help maintain these massive pieces of engineering like rigs and pipelines? That is, the divers who go into the sea a few hundred feet to lay the pipelines or maintain them, and the oil rigs?

These men — and women — are very much there. Theirs is a small, small world — there are barely 2,500 certified divers in India, and maybe a 100,000 worldwide. Only about 70 per cent do what’s called saturation diving or diving at great depths.

It’s a small club, with restricted entry and very tight rules, and they take huge risks each time they go underwater. Down there, they breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen called heliox (it reduces the work of breathing by decreasing airway resistance. Heliox is also a medical treatment for patients with breathing difficulty).

Dharmendar Singh is 38 years old and though he is not a diver, he helps manage the ships that make maintenance diving possible. He joined the merchant navy in 2004 and has sailed all over the world.

“But after about 15 years on oil tankers, it gets very tiresome,” he says. “So I decided to look for something that would keep me away from home for shorter periods.”

So now he is on a “diving support vessel” as a senior dynamic positioning operator with an “Unlimited Foreign Going Master Certificate of Competency”. His main job is to keep the vessel absolutely rock still over the patch where the divers are working.

“It’s like hovering helicopters. Very intense work,” he says, blowing smoke rings from a Korean cigarette.

Now he works off India’s west coast and in the Persian Gulf. His job is to ensure a proper work environment for the divers.

“Mine is the easy part,” he says. “It’s the divers who do the real work.”

Life as a diver

Hardivendar Singh is a dive superintendent. His job, as the designation suggests, is to supervise the divers and the work they do.

He comes up with a surprising nugget: most divers are from North India — Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. “They are strong,” he says.

It’s neither easy to become a diver, nor cheap. “The training is all done abroad, in Europe, US, and South Africa,” he says.

It’s a three-month course, except in the US where it is six-month-long, and can cost Rs 12-15 lakh.

Jobs, he says, are not easy to come by and quite often the ones who get the jobs quit very early on because it's not an easy life.

“Can you imagine what it is like to remain in a pressure chamber for as many as 28 days continuously?”

Divers need to be in pressurised chambers even after surfacing because otherwise they can face serious health issues and even death if

they depressurise too quickly. So they just stay in the pressure chambers.

Many opt out early from this life. “You need real passion for the work,” says Dharmender.

The divers tend to operate in tight-knit groups because the hiring is almost entirely by word of mouth. So there is a core team of seven or eight and, as in a cricket team, the rest come and go.

That’s why there are only around 2,500 qualified divers in India and that’s why they can earn as much as Rs 30,000 per day. Given that on an average, a diver does 20-25 dives a month, the money is pretty good.

Some of them are 50 years old, beyond which the rules don’t permit diving.
 

The business used to be dominated by foreign companies but from about the mid-1980s some ex-Indian Navy divers set up their own businesses. This helped cut diving costs by as much as 60 per cent. Indian divers work all over the world. They are like those IT professionals who get hired for short 3-4 month contracts in diverse locations.

Dharmender says the crew on his ship is mostly Indian but they can have men and women from other countries, too. Their diverse food needs are taken care of by caterers who stay on board and can offer meals according to nationalities.

Fresh food is supplied every week. Alcohol is not officially allowed. The divers have their laptops for entertainment in the chambers.

“But there is hardly any time for that,” says Dharmender “after an 8-10-hour shift. There’s a lot of heavy-lifting involved because the parts are massive and heavy. The ocean’s buoyancy helps but even so the pats can weigh up to half a tonne.”

The Indians are more hardworking. So although officially the shift is for eight hours, they often stretch it to finish the job. The onboard medics don’t like it but there’s little they can do about it.

Hard work. Good money. Long off periods in a year. It’s a great gig but many of the smaller companies have shut down in the last five or six years for the want of business.