Singh was addressing the third meeting of the Maritime States Development Council (MSDC) at Visakhapatnam on Sunday. The two-day meeting discussed 11key points to improve functioning of the Indian ports in the changed globalised economic scenario.

Stating that there should not be any rigid barriers between major and minor ports for efficient and economic service, he stressed the need to be viable synergy of operations among ports depending on the pattern, like availability of favourable locations for port development, connectivity to hinterland and environmental factors.

He clarified that there was no proposal to bring minor ports under the any central regulatory authority including the Tariff Authority for Major Ports (TAMP) for the purpose of tariff regulations.

Singh said the coordinated efforts between major and minor ports were necessary to curb haphazard growth of minor ports which had a major role in sharing the load from the major ports.

Stating that about 18 per cent of the total minor ports traffic had been contributed by Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Goa and 2 per cent by other states, Singh said enormous potential of minor ports was yet to be tapped.He said all ports together handled just 1 per cent of the international container traffic. None of the ports had yet crossed the 1 million TEU mark.

The total container traffic handled by all the ports had just crossed 2 million TEU in 1999-2000 compared to about 16 million TEU's singly handled by Hong Kong and Singapore ports. The productivity levels in container handling at ports were yet to catch up with international levels.

He said the Union government was committed to the development of Jawaharlal Nehru Port on the west coast and Chennai Port on the east coast as container ports of international standards.

He said the government was keen on mainline vessels calling at the ports. Of the 2 million containers handled by 11 major ports, about 80 per cent were transshipped outside the country to Colombo, Dubai and Singapore ports. Indian imports and exports were rendered less competitive because of transhipment to foreign ports.

With the development of these two ports and augmentation of various feeder services between these two and other major port, a major chunk of the container traffic now going to Colombo would be diverted to JNPT and ChPT, Singh added.

While the customs department had rationalised and streamlined their procedures, there was need for further simplification of procedures to enable transhipment to take place at the Indian hub ports.

Singh said exporters using Indian feeder ports were paid duty drawback only after a delay of 4-6 weeks, whereas it was being paid immediately at Dubai and Singapore.

Coastal shipping lines providing shipping services to exporters for aggregating their cargo at the gateway port had to execute a bond and submit a bank guarantee for a very high amount. This acted as a major deterrent both to the aggregation of containers at the gateway ports as well as to the development of coastal shipping, he said.

He suggested that all coastal service providers should be permitted to carry both import and export containers and domestic containers on the same voyage and on the same vessel. Without this, coastal shipping services themselves were likely to be unviable and could deal a severe blow to the transhipment programme. Placing before the council the recommendations of the senior officers, R Vasudevan, secretary, department of shipping, said that a taskforce has been constituted to make in-depth study of various aspects of coordinated development of major and minor ports.

On the report of the RITES regarding a perspective plan covering 25 years for the entire port sector, he said that the report was expected to be completed by September 2000 and would be made available to all maritime state governments.