A case is being made out that the development of new ports in the vicinity of Mumbai should be stopped. The Mumbai Port Trust and its allies within the ministry in Delhi feel this will be bad for existing ports under the trust. Environmentalists have another opinion: anything new and of benefit to others are bad, especially if it disturbs their private villas already contravening every environmental, forestry and coastal regulatory regulation. Most of all, those whose inertia levels are based on an increasingly inefficient Mumbai as a harbour would really hate to see efficient world-class, deep-water ports of the sort springing up in Gujarat at their very own doorsteps.
This correspondent grew up and got his stripes in the ?70s in the brown-orange waters in and around Mumbai. By the ?80s, if you were a shippie, you were likely to have been on a ship too big to call at Mumbai. The world was, literally, sailing past Mumbai. To nimble competition from trans-shipment ports springing up all over?Colombo, Fujairah, Dubai?to many of us, Mumbai port started dying in the ?80s. Today, distant ports like Goa and Kandla end up providing facilities for cargo bound for Mumbai and its environs, and trans-shipment is almost the norm. With daily hire rates for ships hitting six digits in dollar terms, who wants to hang around at anchorage and take a chance going aground in shallow channels? A quick look at the satellite imagery of the coast around Mumbai tells it better than anything else. The port of Mumbai is being drowned in its own silt.
But the skyline is truly defined by the various ocean-going ships, mercantile as well as naval, which lie at anchor in what was known as Front Bay. The main reason for Mumbai being what it is today is that Bom Baia, or Bombay, or Mumba, provided excellent access to the hinterland for trade. And that reason is vanishing faster than the silt can accumulate in the harbour. It happened in San Francisco, New York, London, and elsewhere, too. Thanks to reclamation as well as closing down the natural flushing and other allied reasons, what goes in with the high tide does not rush out with the ebb. Simple. In addition, run-off from inland areas settles down in the lowest parts, which are the same channels that are supposed to be kept to a workable depth.
The reality is that parts of Bombay harbour, where we sailed in high tide waters as much as 20 metres deep, are now 10 metres?a depth not viable even for small coastal ships. It is not as though there is a shortage of viable deep-water options both north and south of Mumbai. Dighi is already coming up rapidly. Revas at the mouth of the Amba river is another very viable one. Alewadi in Thane is being surveyed. But our friends at Mumbai Port Trust and their bosses in Delhi would like to think that their interest surpasses a larger national interest.
If Mumbai has to survive as a great shipping centre, and all that flows from it including the financial and other service sectors, then the harbour has to move with the times. And if that means shipping activities have to move a few score kilometres away, so be it. It can only be for the larger good. It is indeed very short sighted of Mumbai Port Trust to try to place a spanner in the works now that something is being done. They had their chance in the ?70s and ?80s, and they blew it.
Let the new ports around Mumbai emerge. These will be, truly, the signposts for a far better and stronger Mumbai. Otherwise, very soon, it will be difficult to take even sailing boats out into Front Bay. You see, there is almost 10 million cubic metres of silt being removed (on paper, if not actually, dredging is a great business where fudging figures is infra dig) every year, and it still keeps backing up. And if that is not a valid reason for the port to move out of Mumbai, then what else is? Will we wait until we can walk across the Bay?
