One of the most telling figures in Vijay Kelkar?s now-famous report on direct taxes, released in 2003, is to be found in the preface. Kelkar had calculated that the transaction cost for Indian exporters was an extraordinary Rs 5,000 crore every year. Part of this huge claim on earnings was the cost of paperwork and partly it was accounted for by the logistical nightmare of shipping from any Indian port. Subsequent studies have only gone on to expand that number. Besides 12 major ports, India today has 200 minor ports, but as the big ones handle three-fourths of the total traffic, the onus is on them to turn in a better performance. But that is just not happening. The average turnaround time at major ports has worsened to 3.79 days going by the figures from the last fiscal. This is a few hours more than the 3.50 days it took a ship to unload and reload its cargo at Indian ports in 2005-06. Port efficiency is one of the few areas where India is regressing. Port turnaround figures look absurd compared with those in other Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong where the whole process takes less than 10 hours. If one adds the average 11 hours of pre-berthing time?that is the number of hours a ship spends on the high seas before it gets a docking space?the picture in India one of dreadful inefficiency.
The average turnaround time is worse at the busy ports like Kandla and Mumbai?4.62 days and 4.30 days, respectively?and again worse than the position in those ports two years ago. And Kandla handles mostly liquid cargo, that takes much less processing time. The privatised Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust has a far better average at 1.79 days, which has improved in the same period. It is now a forgotten fact that the government had begun the reforms in telecom and in ports at about the same time in the 1990s. The telecom sector was handed over to the initiative of private players, and now even the public sector telecom companies play by the same rules. But ports, quite inexplicably, remained exclusively government controlled. This difference is the key reason why, despite being on the busiest shipping lane in the world, even domestic Indian carriers often use neighbouring country ports to do business.