Coastal Leadership: Impact of Port Investments on Port Urbanisation at Major Ports in India

The historical study of Indian urbanisation reveals that ports had played an important role since colonial times in both trade and urbanisation. Ports and shipping in India still play an important role in international trade, despite the tremendous growth of other alternative major modes and means of transport, such as airways. This is because ports presently comprise almost 70 per cent of the total value of world trade, even in the post-liberalisation period, despite the growth of air transport. However, in this era of globalisation, with a gradual shift to a more outwards oriented trade regime, there has been massive expansion in the volume of India’s seaborne trade, together with a change in the composition of Indian port traffic, from break bulk to liquid bulk, dry bulk, and containerised cargo, with a decisive shift towards containerisation in the mode of cargo delivery post 1990s, across both the western and eastern coasts of the country. To cope with the above-mentioned challenge, coupled with the growth of world-class infrastructure in response to the emerging trends in global sea-trade and shipping trends, the growth of port urbanisation is highly affected, as a result of the corresponding port investments across both the coasts. This paper, therefore, statistically assesses the impact of port investments on port urbanisation in India. While doing so, a comparative study between the ports in the western and eastern coasts has also been attempted, to judge the performance of the coasts in this respect, where the dominant leadership role of the western coast is a major finding.