India needs to view the maritime canvas holistically

Make in India, Make for World 

This is the right goal for maritime development in India. India needs to aspire for and work towards a significant global presence in this arena. In shipbuilding, India has been a laggard. We need to invest in research and development, and design and manufacturing capabilities, initially in collaboration with advanced ship-building countries. The development of the Indian auto sector offers many lessons. Private sector must be incentivised, and competition must be encouraged. We are a little better placed in ship repair and even more in ship recycling, though these domains need greater emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) parameters. 

In the shipping sector, our global presence (use of Indian flagged vessels) is abysmal. Significant regulatory reforms will be required, with appropriate incentives, to promote Indian shipping.  In the port sector, including container transhipment, we have now come to a maturity stage in terms of learning from advanced countries. We can be in a take-off stage to offer port development and port management expertise to other countries. However, there appears to be only one entity (Adanis) that seems to have the capability and hunger to do this. Given the size of the opportunity, it is important to encourage a few other Indian private players to grow in this sector. 

On the service side, while there has been an emphasis on ship leasing through the GIFT City initiative, other areas like maritime insurance and classification need attention. Encouraging private sector play would be essential. In education and training, we have a mature base. There are two directions. We could provide such services to maritime professionals of other countries. We could also export skilled professionals, which already happens to a significant extent, though the word is that Indian professionals are expensive. New opportunities are there in leveraging maritime heritage and tourism. 

Supply Chain Focus 

The focus on international container transhipment ports, coastal shipping, inland waterways, multimodal hubs, road connectivity and rail connectivity has been well placed. On the container transhipment port, the consideration for location(s) would be important. In any case, we must bring container transhipment into India, not only the containers for India, but even those for the Arabian Sea (and Gulf), Bay of Bengal, and Indian Ocean rim countries. 

As part of port connectivity, investments are moving in the direction of leveraging coastal and inland water transportation. Road connectivity is also happening, though focus on expressways right into ports could do with more emphasis. The Western dedicated freight corridor (DFC) provides for port connectivity with double stack container movement. The Eastern DFC is still not near ports. Further, the electrification here does not provide for double-stack container movement. This must be corrected at the earliest, to the extent possible. More importantly, whenever rail connectivity is being provided to ports, the focus must be with a double-line alignment. The recently inaugurated Haridaspur-Paradeep single-line rail connectivity will be a bottleneck right from the start, given the plans for the port of Paradeep. 

Mindset on Ports 

There has been mention of developing ‘mega-ports’. For this development, it is important to consider whether we need more new port locations (which politically provides for a ‘glamour quotient’) or build around some of the existing ports to take advantage of scale. Leveraging scale would be the way to go. In fact, if we really want a ‘mega-port’, just redesignating the physically close Gulf of Kutch ports (APSEZ at Mundra, Deendayal Port at Kandla, Reliance Port at Sikka and a few other neighbouring non-major ports) as a single port would get us a global top ten port of over 400 million tonnes per annum.  

The focus on smart and green ports is the way to go. This becomes important not only for the growing container traffic, but also bulk traffic. 

Another important mindset change is required in the context of major ports in India, which are under the Union ministry of ports, shipping and waterways (MoPSW).  For legacy reasons, they tend to view themselves only as part of the major port cohort in terms of competitive performance. This was very clear to me, a jury member of the Maritime Excellence Awards, while listening to the presentations of the major ports. This is reinforced by the MoPSW, which in most of its communication and performance statistics implicitly only refers to major ports. It should be noted that non-major ports account for 45 percent of the national traffic share and could slowly inch their way towards majority share. The largest port (APSEZ at Mundra) in the country is not a major port.  The major ports could learn many practices from the non-major ports and even vice versa. It is therefore important for the MoPSW to view itself as promoting port development in the country holistically by not leaving out the state-driven ports and then take a view on those ports which it directly controls. 

In the PM’s own words, if we are to leverage “development, demography, democracy, and demand,” the canvas must be viewed holistically.

G Raghuram is Professor Emeritus, Gujarat Maritime University, and Advisor, Infrastructure Vision Foundation. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.