India pushes strategic deep-water ports to emerge as regional transshipment hub

India is accelerating upgrades to major ports and building new deep‑water terminals to capture transhipment traffic now routed through Colombo and Singapore, a new report has said, amid the arrival of the MSC Irina at Vizhinjam this month.

The report from India Narrative said the government has moved to deepen drafts at several major ports — Kamarajar Port at Ennore near Chennai, Paradeep Port in Odisha, and Deendayal Port in Kutch — from 14 metres to 18 metres to accommodate larger “mother vessels”.

The report criticised the neglect of previous governments in transforming India’s major ports into international transhipment hubs. Such hubs are needed to accommodate mother vessels that carry 14,000–24,000 twenty‑foot equivalent units (TEUs).

“For decades, India’s maritime trade carried a quiet but costly irony. A nation with over 7,500 kilometres of coastline and some of the busiest shipping lanes passing along its southern tip did not have ports that could accommodate mother vessels.

Within a year of PM Modi's government first signalling its intent to address the gap, "the irony is finally being corrected with arrival of the MSC Irina, the world’s largest container ship, at Vizhinjam Port on July 7," the report said.

It pointed out that the past neglect is now being addressed "with a scale and urgency that matches the scale of the problem".

The government’s current push involves deepening the draft at several major ports to enable them to handle Cape-size dry bulk vessels carrying roughly 2 lakh tonnes of deadweight cargo.

Further, it noted a pipeline of projects, such as Vadhavan Port in Maharashtra, planned with a natural draft near 20 metres and capacity targets that would place it among the world’s top ten container hubs.

"In the private sector, Mundra Port in Gujarat, with a 17.5-metre draft, has already proven the concept by becoming the only Indian port shipping over 14,000 TEUs directly to the United States, cutting out the middleman hub entirely," the report said.