Cabinet nod for Maharashtra deep port that will be among world’s top 10

NEW DELHI: The

Union

Cabinet on Wednesday gave its “inprinciple” approval for setting up a major port at Vadhavan near

Dahanu

in Maharashtra and it will become the thirteenth major port in the country.


With 20 metre draft (depth), it will come up as one of the top 10 ports across the globe to receive mother ships, which currently come to Colombo or Singapore to offload the cargo to be transferred to Indian ports. This is the first project to be approved by the Cabinet, which was included in the Infrastructure Projects Pipeline.

Union shipping minister Mansukh L Mandaviya said the project will involve approximately Rs 64,545 crore investment. “The Centre will have 51% of share of the special purpose vehicle, which will be set up to develop the port.

Maharashtra Maritime Board

and private players can have the rest of the share in the SPV,” he said.

He said there will be hardly any requirement to acquire land for developing the port. Vadhavan port will be developed on “land lord model”. The SPV will be formed with

Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust

as the lead partner and it will develop the port infrastructure including reclamation, construction of breakwater, besides establishing connectivity to the hin terland.

All the business activities would be undertaken under public private partnership mode by private developers. Currently, JNPT is the biggest container port in India and is ranked at 28th position globally with a traffic of 5.1 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units). Even after the completion of fourth terminal at JNPT with a capacity increase up to 10 million TEUs by 2023, it will stand as the 17th largest container port in the world. Mandaviya said development of Vadhavan port will enable call of container vessels of 16,00025,000 TEUs capacity, giving advantages of economies of scale and reducing the logistics cost.