Privatisation hinted to revive Mumbai port

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI, SEPT. 3. The new Shipping Minister, Mr. Vedprakash Goel, was shocked when he drove through the Mumbai Port today. There were trucks with tyres deflated by disuse, several wagons lying idle and cranes in similar disposition.

There are two ways of looking at it, he said. One is to view it as a dying port and allow it to die. Another is to take it as a challenge and revive it. After all, it was once a bubbling port. The sight he i saw in a mere drive-through has ``steeled my determination'' to do something.

What struck him as ironic in a drive through the port - on the less-crowded route exclusively set aside for port use or VIPs - were the huge slogans like ``Work is Worship'' and ``Productivity is key to prosperity''. ``Isse kafi santaap hota hai,'' he said.

Set up in 1873, the Mumbai Port has fallen on bad days. It helped the neighbouring modern Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust by being an investor, but found its traffic fall consequently, hurting its own interests. Commodity-wise traffic has, for instance, been more or less static since 1994-95; it was 32,048,000 dead weight tonnes in 1994-95 and stabilised around 30,000,000 tonnes, but the gap between imports and exports has been widening.

Later, the Minister told newsmen that in his bid to revive the Mumbai port, one of the largest at one time and certainly, the oldest major port in the country, it could ``be privatisation, a mixed bag of other options'' which ``I cannot speak about now. It would be improper to do so''.

Mr. Goel, a techno-industrialist with a long association with the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, admitted that he was enthusiastic of doing something, but he had just assumed charge. ``I spent only 30 minutes with the officers of my Ministry on Sunday and then I came here''.

As a Shipping Minister, Mr. Goel has charge of all the 13 major ports in the country, apart from the inland water business which has been lying more or less neglected all along and says he would like to find solutions to long-pending problems. ``Only JNPT - a port close to Mumbai - has helped us save our face''.

Mr. Goel wondered why big ships went to neighbouring countries with better turnaround time and then tranship freight by smaller vessels by which ``cost of landed goods is higher by 40 per cent''. Perhaps ``100 year old cranes take 20 days to unload what other countries do in 20 hours! This way, we are nowhere near competing''.

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