Bhubaneswar: Assocham, country’s leading business and industries body, has suggested that the India must invest in port sector to make it globally competitive. It also stressed the need to revisit the Major Ports Trusts Act, 1963 with a view to modernise the institutional structure of major ports and to secure greater operational freedom for ports, in tune with present day requirements.
Releasing the Assocham study report titled “Indian ports sector: Challenges of scale and efficient operations,” here on Tuesday, the secretary general , DS Rawat and chief advisor Arvind Kumar said, “India must boost its ports fast to make them globally competitive as the gap with China is widening rapidly”.
“India s total containerised cargo capacity of 8.75 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) at all its 12 major port is less than a quarter of containerised goods handled at Shanghai port, making it imperative for us to do a fast catching up,” said the Assocham study.
Handling of containerised cargo is a key indicator of a country s integration with global supply chain for value-added manufactured goods, it said.
The study also suggested that it would be appropriate to augment capacity of existing ports to create ports with large capacity of 100 million tonnes (MT) rather than building new ports and spreading resources thinly.
Rawat said, though Indian ports met rapidly expanding traffic, handling more than a billion tonne of cargo in 2016-17, the capacity is expected to rise to 2.5 billion tonnes by 2025. The freight mainly comprises petrol, oil, and lubricant, coal, iron ore and other commodities, he added.
The Assocham secretary general said, it is only recently that freight in containers, which are easy to load, unload and carry to the hinterland through multi-modal transport, is catching up in India. However, he said , while total containerised cargo volume for the whole of India s major ports is about 8.75 million TEUs, it is 36.5 million TEUs in Shanghai. According to him China has four ports which handle more than 20 million TEUs, he added.
Rawat said setting up 13 non-major ports along 480 km-long coastline of Odisha will further boost the prospect of port infrastructure, bring in investment, create thousands of jobs and also add to the revenues of the state exchequer.
