India’s only woman river pilot bags President award

KOLKATA: One evening, when Reshma Nilofer Naha entered the bridge of a Chinese vessel at Sagar, the master of the ship waited for a man to climb up after her. When nobody else appeared, the captain asked: “Where is the pilot?”
“I am the pilot who will be taking you to Kolkata,” was Naha’s calm reply.
“Initially, he must have thought that I was a trainee. Many mariners react in the same manner and some are even shocked.After reaching the port, the same men thank me, expressing happiness at the way I manoeuvre the ship through the bars and bends of the Hooghly. That is the way to earn respect,” Naha told TOI a couple of days after receiving the Nari Shakti Award from President Ram Nath Kovind.

At Middleton Point near Sagar, river pilots board ships to navigate them for the remaining 148km up the Hooghly to Kolkata. These pilots are unique to the Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT) and of the 56 in service, Naha is the only woman. This is a highly specialized job.
“As a kid, I had a pretty mediocre dream. I wanted to be a doctor. Later, I decided to do something offbeat. Nearly 90% of my seniors went for engineering and ended up joining IT firms. I feel that doing some other job after pursuing a course in core engineering is unjust. Fortunately, my parents allowed me to choose a different career,” she added.
Soon after this, Naha (named after the famous Pakistani singer) spotted an advertisement by a Danish shipping giant of a tailor-made dual competency course that had both the deck and engineering sides clubbed together. She was one of 300 students out of 4,000 to qualify for the fully-sponsored programme. Finally, armed with a BE (Marine Technology) degree from BIT, Mesra, she started serving on container ships.
“I joined KoPT in 2011. I also possess a second mate’s foreign-going licence. After undergoing training for nearly six-and-a-half years, I finally became a Hooghly River Pilot in January 2018. My parents are both retired central government employees and my husband Avik Naha is also a mariner,” she said.
Naha never felt uncomfortable in a male-dominated profession. This is probably because the 5-6 girls in college had to stay in a space earmarked for them in the boys’ hostel. This made her comfortable in the presence of members of the opposite gender and a mutual trust was born.
“I keep telling women that how men will treat them depends on how they carry themselves. They will be respected and taken seriously only if they behave in a certain manner and prove that they are in no way inferior,” Naha said.