(Commonwealth) _ The country’s failure to attract larger container ships owing to weak port infrastructure threatens Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s objective of making India the world’s factory. Most Indian coast ports aren’t deep enough to handle boats like the Ever Alot, the world’s largest boxship at 400 meters long and with a capacity of more than 24,000 twenty-foot equivalent units. The Ever Alot, which may surpass the Empire State Building in length, has recently visited neighboring Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, India’s largest state-run container handling facility, lacks the 17-meter draft required for such boats to navigate. Mundra Port, run by billionaire Gautam Adani’s company, has stated it can manage the mammoth but has so far been bypassed. The largest vessel to have berthed there is the 17,292-TEU APL Raffles, which arrived in January 2022 with 13,159 TEUs on board.
“Ultra-large ships bring economies of scale,” Shailesh Garg, director at Drewry Maritime Advisors, explained. “However, just expanding the size of the vessel will not assist speed up the transfer of products to and from the hinterland.” Road and rail connections from ports to warehouses, manufacturers, and stores must also be enhanced, according to him.
According to a Reserve Bank of India assessment published in 2022, poor maritime connectivity has hampered India’s entry into the global value chain. The country earned 34% in the GVC participation index, compared to 45.9% for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, according to the RBI. According to a different assessment, Vietnam scored more than 50% on the index.
Mundra Port welcomed APL Raffles three years after Vietnam welcomed a similar-class ship, demonstrating how Asia’s third-largest economy risks slipping behind in the race for a larger proportion of commerce as corporations shift away from China. Mundra is India’s highest-ranked port in terms of performance, placing 48th in an index developed by the World Bank Group and S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Weak infrastructure is hampering Modi’s goal of increasing the nation’s share of global goods exports to 3% by 2027 and 10% by 2047, up from 2.1% presently.
“The present port and terminal infrastructure in India does limit the ability of employing the full strength of extremely big boats,” AP Moller-Maersk A/S stated in an email response to questions. Some of the considerations are “the draft in the ports, cranes at terminals used for loading and unloading cargo, and port throughput capacity.”
According to Maersk, the world’s second-largest container shipping line, another factor to consider is that Indian importers and exporters are dispersed around the country, and it is more cost and time effective to send and receive goods through a port closer to their operations. According to the London-based data research firm CEIC Data, India’s container throughput of 16 million TEUs as of December 2020 compares to China’s 245 million TEUs.
While vessels with a draft of 17 meters or deeper account for only 0.7% of the active global container fleet, these bigger ships are becoming increasingly important for trade between Europe and China. Given its strategic location between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, India can participate in this route.
Vizhinjam Port in Kerala, India, is a deep-sea facility with a natural draft of 20-24 meters, making it capable of drawing larger ships. It is planned to be operational by 2024, according to Roy Paul, a spokesman for Adani Group, which is constructing the project. According to the government’s Maritime India Vision 2030, another port in Maharashtra with a natural draft of 18 meters is projected to be constructed in 2028.
