From GIFT City financing to design standardisation, experts at THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2026 list priorities for Indian maritime supply chain ecosystem

The final session of THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2026 not only offered a bird’s eye view of a plethora of topics discussed so far, but also blended them into a fitting conclusion for the two-day event, titled ‘Sailing to Prosperity’.

The panellists looked at the strategic challenges and opportunities in developing and fortifying a globally competent, end-to-end maritime supply chain network present at every stage of a ship’s cyclic life in India—or “from cradle to cradle”, as Prasad Sawant, CEO, Buoyancy, called it in the preceding panel on ship recycling.

Notably, this panel also went a step further than the rest, offering not just responses to the central question put forth by the moderator, Gaurav Dayal—the Chairperson of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA)—but also practical priority areas that would help bridge the gap between national maritime ambitions and a robust, globally competitive supply chain.

Suresh Swamy, Partner, Price Waterhouse & Co LLP, took on Dayal’s questions on maritime financing, the allure of GIFT City, and bringing private capital into domestic shipbuilding and equipment manufacturing.

He first pointed out how the historical issue of Indian shipowners seeking overseas capital due to constraints on domestic foreign-currency financing was being tackled by the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in Gujarat’s GIFT City.

“Operating as a special economic jurisdiction, GIFT City allows entities to transact entirely in convertible foreign currency while enjoying competitive tax frameworks, full tax holidays, and exemptions from withholding tax on overseas capital borrowing,” he explained.

Swamy also stressed that though such macro-level reforms offered a level of “financial plumbing” that shipowners, lessors, and financiers only got from Dubai and Singapore before, it was also important to extend these to the shipyard floor.

He pointed to two critical operational bottlenecks dragging down domestic shipyards: the inverted GST structure that wastes vital working capital, as well as the restrictive collateral demands that banks place in front of shipyards before granting them the advance refund guarantees that global shipowners ask for.

Swamy later circled back to this point and said that the solutions to these issues—robust regulatory mechanisms and banks/special funds for the maritime sector—were his two priority areas for the sector.

Prof C.K. Upadhyay, who heads the Centre for Maritime Logistics at Gujarat Maritime University (GMU), took a page from panel four of the summit (on skilling mariners), and said that the modern maritime industry demands more than just traditional seafarers.

It also needs specialised digital planners, supply chain analysts, and legal experts, he opined, arguing that the GMU was helping such people handle real-time telemetry and emissions data to meet global IMO mandates like the Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) to keep India’s supply chains globally compliant.

“Through the Gujarat Maritime Cluster initiative launched by the Gujarat Maritime Board, we are integrating logistics data, port calls, vendor inventories, and academic research into a single unified platform,” he noted as his priority area—and how this brings about a complete, resilient maritime ecosystem.

Vice Admiral B. Kannan (Retd) offered a comprehensive look at both the hardware and software realities of shipbuilding today.

He noted how natural tensions exist between design, procurement, and production timelines, and how resolving risk within these three functions and managing them effectively was the key to tackling the hardware front, which again calls for better infrastructure, better maritime training, and better design engineering.

On the software front, Vice Admiral Kannan talks of Supply Chain 4.0 as the specific software module that helps shipyards balance the cost of carrying inventory against the cost of a stock-out delay using predictive algorithms and historical vendor performance data. This, he pointed out, should be part of the bigger aim to integrate it with Industry 4.0 and AI-led procurement tools to keep the supply chain ecosystem future-proof.

To Dayal’s primary focus area question, Vice Admiral Kannan answered in favour of “enforcing design standardisation” for shipbuilding—a topic contested in panel three (shipbuilding)—whereas with ship repair, he felt that “success depends entirely on turnaround speed”, for which it is worth establishing “specialised Auxiliary Equipment Parks adjacent to repair docks with Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) service representatives, certified testing labs, and pre-stocked critical spare parts”.

With these multi-level suggestions for the maritime sector, the final panel of THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2026 dropped anchor, offering government officials, naval leaders, students, and industry experts across the maritime, naval, and logistics sectors an idea of how the summit will engage with the sector on an even stronger level in the years to come.