India's maritime makeover: How a ‘quiet’ ministry became a global powerhouse

Sunil Kumar has one year left for retirement. For 35 years, the multi-tasking staffer, earlier called a ‘peon’, has been moving through the corridors of the shipping ministry, carrying files and ushering in visitors. Not only does he know the Parivahan Bhavan inside out, but he is also one of the few people who has seen up close how the ministry has transformed through the years. “At one time, shipping, road transport and highways were clubbed under a single ministry,” he says. “Then visitors thronged the corridors like they do now. That entire ministry had just two joint secretaries. Now the shipping ministry itself has five or six. Earlier, it was like a big family where everyone knew everyone. Now, many ministry jobs are being outsourced to private agencies and with frequent transfers from one ministry to the other, most faces are unfamiliar.”

The style of work has also changed, he says. “Earlier, the lower staff would be very busy because they had to do most of the paperwork on typewriters,” he says. “Nowadays, even the top officials are very busy as they have to do the work themselves on computers. They simply do not have any spare time.”

What was once seen as a “quiet” ministry has now morphed into a war room.

All the sofa seats in the visitors’ rooms are usually occupied. Visitors—government officials in their starched white shirts, corporate professionals in suits, favour seekers, or just the odd acquaintance—all wait for their turn to meet the minister and top officials.

“The PMO seeks updates from the ministry almost on a daily basis,” says a ministry official. “The entire maritime ecosystem is in a churn. New pathways for growth are being conceived and executed. Then there is a war in West Asia and energy security has become a buzzword. The importance of the ministry has increased manifold in recent months and years.”

If the ministry was once about shipping, ports and waterways, it is now also about energy security, trade wars and geopolitics. Realisation dawned late that for a country where 70 per cent of trade by value and 95 per cent by volume moves by sea, the maritime sector can actually be the new engine of growth.

“The past decade has indeed been a golden one for the maritime sector, with multiple initiatives in-house and in distant areas of interest,” says Commodore R.S. Vasan (retd), regional director of the National Maritime Foundation. “There is a resurgence of a determined nation that would like to reinvent its glorious maritime past. What is visible is the multi-pronged push across ports, shipbuilding, inland waterways and outreach with the maritime neighbourhood. Additionally, the nation is doing very well when it comes to indigenous production of warships. The resurgence is real and supported by real data of the past ten years plus. The strategy is simple. Connect Sagarmala, inland waterways, Act East and the west to reduce logistics cost, invest in shipbuilding and repair, and become a powerful maritime nation.”

The first notable development was the Sagarmala programme in 2015, under which ports would not be the endpoints of a shipping line, but the starting point of industrial clusters. It aims to cut logistics costs, enhance trade efficiency, and create employment through smarter, greener transport networks. As part of this, 840 projects worth Rs5.8 lakh crore would be implemented by 2035, of which 315, worth Rs1.5 lakh crore, have been completed. Of the 234 port modernisation projects worth Rs2.9 lakh crore, nearly half have been completed.

“After decades, we see a structural, policy-driven transformation that is fundamentally shifting how India handles global and domestic trade,” says H.K. Joshi, former chairperson and managing director of the Shipping Corporation of India. “It is a broader transformation involving infrastructure, logistics, shipbuilding, green transition, technology, finance and workforce development. The next decade could be one of the most important periods in India’s maritime history.”

Prof Joe Thomas Karackattu of IIT Madras, who has worked a lot on maritime migration, reinforces the point: “The maritime sector might be the ‘blue vertebrae’ that sustains job creation in shipbuilding, repair, port operations and other aspects of commercial shipping. If approached with earnestness, it could ease the concerns relating to employment generation in our country, but failing which it would end up as just another performative announcement.”

What has added to the churn is a strong dose of domestic politics—the Modi government claims that the maritime sector never received its due since independence, despite India’s 4,500-year maritime heritage. And that has really caught on.

The archaeological sites at Lothal and Dholavira, both in Gujarat, provide the earliest evidence of Indian seafaring, which was largely led by the requirements of trade. No wonder then that about 12 per cent of the world’s seafarers are Indians, employed in a range of verticals including navigation, ship operations, logistics and allied maritime industries.

Shipbuilding, too, was a focus area centuries ago—the Yukti Kalpataru, written by King Bhoja (1000-1055 CE) of the Paramara dynasty, is among the earliest treatises on shipbuilding.

The main centres of shipbuilding were in present-day Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Bengal, from where many European companies would buy ships. Indian ships would sail to Mesopotamia, Arabia, Africa and Southeast Asia.

But the British, through policy, de-industrialised quite a few sectors of the Indian economy, a prime victim being shipbuilding. The aim was to reduce India to the role of a raw material supplier and be a ready market for British-made goods.

The policy crippled India’s maritime domain for a long time and did incalculable harm to the traditional shipbuilding industry.

Though that damage cannot be fully undone, there is a renewed focus on the sector, which was highlighted in November 2020—the shipping ministry was renamed the ministry of ports, shipping and waterways. While progress has been rapid since, there is a long way to go.

In the past 12 years, total cargo handled at Indian ports has risen 59 per cent from 1,052 million metric tons (MMT) to 1,668MMT, total port capacity has increased 81 per cent from 1,561MMT to 2,818MMT and cargo on national waterways rose 652 per cent from 29MMT to 218MMT. From Rs11,760 crore, major ports’ annual revenue went up 126 per cent to Rs26,583 crore.

According to the World Bank Container Port Performance Index, three Indian ports now figure in the top 30—Mundra Port in Gujarat, Paradip Port in Odisha and Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Navi Mumbai.

The government’s regulatory framework has helped this progress. While last year’s Merchant Shipping Act and the Indian Ports Act have replaced colonial-era laws, there has been a broader roadmap in the form of the Maritime India Vision 2030 and the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047 (MAKV 2047). The aim is to not just meet India’s trade demands, but to emerge as a maritime leader.

Dr Malini V. Shankar, vice chancellor of the Chennai-based Indian Maritime University, points out the priorities: “Getting the ecosystem right for shipbuilding, systematic approach for skilling and creating the enabling factors for scaling up.”

Under MAKV 2047, nearly Rs80 lakh crore would be invested in more than 300 actionable initiatives for ports, coastal shipping, inland waterways, shipbuilding and green shipping initiatives.

However, several structural bottlenecks persist. “Shipbuilding continues to be a weak area with just about 1 per cent of global shipbuilding and less than 1 per cent of vessels,” says Vasan. “The target of achieving 10 per cent of global shipbuilding in the next one decade is a daunting one.”

Notably, India pays foreign shipping companies $75 billion to ferry cargo every year. That is nearly as much as the country’s 2025-26 defence budget: $78 billion.

When the West Asia conflict flared up and India-Europe ships had to be rerouted via the Cape of Good Hope, freight rates jumped 12 per cent in one month.

Indian exporters paid the bill, foreign shipowners reaped the profits.

“The conflict exposed the serious limitations of connectivity and challenges to unimpeded flow of trade,” says Vasan. “That India was able to withstand the downstream effect itself has many lessons for the future. The major issues of diversification of supply chains, review of strategic petroleum reserve, adoption of new technologies (ethanol) and renewable energy initiatives saw an upward swing.

“The importance of the India Middle-East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and other maritime routes, and having a strong Navy to escort our ships has never been felt more acutely. So this needs to be taken as an opportunity to review our preparedness and contingencies on a war footing to ensure that India is not caught off guard again.”

A key point, Vasan adds, is the coordination between the states and the Centre. “There are issues that can be handled better with a common focus,” he says. “And then of course, India still has a lot to resolve to address both ease of doing business and speed of doing business. Adoption of cutting-edge technology and AI is inescapable for India to forge ahead in the maritime sector.”

Joshi adds that the sector is undergoing a transition and lists the major drawbacks: “Financing gaps, where large green transition investments are required; shipbuilding competitiveness as India still trails countries like China, South Korea and Japan; technology gaps where automation and advanced marine technology need stronger domestic capability; immense pressure to ‘green’ the entire value chain; and skilled manpower, as all future maritime jobs will need new skills.”

There are some bright spots already. India is the world leader in safe, environmentally sustainable and responsible ship recycling. The country’s share in worldwide ship recycling has increased from 30 per cent in 2024 to 35.4 per cent in 2025. The aim is to recycle about 16,000 ships over the next decade.

MAKV 2047 has other key targets for India in the next two decades—port capacity of at least 10,000MMT a year (a 300 per cent increase), to be among the top five shipbuilding and repairing nations, creating more than 1.5 crore jobs through maritime professional services, clusters and research initiatives, and to achieve net zero shipping. Undoubtedly ambitious. But not entirely impossible.