India has initiated a comprehensive review of its ports to identify operational shortcomings, government officials said.
All large ports are being evaluated as a part of the exercise on multiple parameters to identify infrastructure deficiencies and highlight improvements. The idea is to scale up port capacities and ready some ports for handling larger ships and green transition, officials said.
“Upgrading existing ports into regional maritime hubs is now the plan,” a senior official said. The evaluation will enable the government to firm up benchmark standards and best practices among ports that can be emulated nationwide. The government also proposes
to rank ports in an exercise that will run in tandem with this evaluation and establish common minimum standards.
The fresh improvements are being planned to supplement targets defined under the Maritime India Vision 2030 (announced in 2020) and work towards the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047.
The exercise also aims to reduce cargo handling and ship turnaround time so that capacity of existing ports can be optimised, the official added.
“New technologies and sectors have emerged since the Vision 2030 goals were defined and they need to be incorporated going forward,” the official said. The evaluation will also investigate green infrastructure plans of the ports with some of them developing Green Hydrogen storage and utilisation facilities.
“Ports are undergoing rapid changes. Scaling up renewable energy procurement and deploying solar or wind generation facilities are also on the agenda,” the official said, adding that the review will look at the scope for adopting futuristic technologies such as methanol and battery powered ships. Major ports are those under the administrative control of the centre while non-major ones are governed by states where they are located. “Each of our ports have strengths on one or two parameters and we want others to learn from them. This will ensure all-round improvement of Indian ports,” a second official said.
For example, he said Visakhapatnam, V.O. Chidambaranar, and New Mangalore ports rely on renewable energy (RE) sources to meet their entire energy demand. On the other hand, Paradip, Kolkata Dock System, and Chennai ports met less than 5% of their energy demand from RE.