PortAccording to a study conducted by ASSOCHAM’s Economic Research Bureau, the development of port infrastructure in India is not on par with other ports across the world. Inefficient port services have posed major challenges to India’s trade, the study reports. This inefficiency and non-competitiveness result in higher costs. The turnaround time at ports in India is one of the biggest handicaps logistics service providers have to deal with.

“There is a need of modern ports in the country as the existing ports are plagued with problems like congestion, poor connectivity and accessibility and lack of adequate facilities. These bottlenecks are proving detrimental to the economic growth of the country,” the report says. Some of the important findings of the report are:

  • Over the last few years, capacity utilization at major ports has been declining.
  • There is urgent need for modernizing the port infrastructure, improving the service quality and increasing the productivity levels.
  • The resources required to build the necessary infrastructure are much larger and, therefore, public investment has inevitably to be supplemented by private sector investment in Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode.
  • The XII Plan objective of attracting more than one lakh crore rupees private investments for developing non-major ports turns out to be an ambitious target unless and otherwise their XI Plan performances are evaluated in proper spirit.
  • In recent years the non-major ports are collectively emerging as the dominant mode of international trade flows.
  • Ports sector, in particular, needs to get policy attention as there not only exist severe capacity constraints and operational inefficiencies, but also certain models on how to address these issues.
  • Uncertainty about the relationship between the major and minor ports as well as between the existing and Greenfield ports is affecting the developments of new ports.

Print pagePDF pageEmail page