As Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee gets ready to host another "Invest in Bengal" extravaganza next month, she may want to consider a constructive suggestion from Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian. He has proposed an "exit" for the Kolkata Port, and putting the huge tracts of land under it to more productive use. It was a courageous statement, given that it was made in a state where such suggestions, with all the implications of uprooting employees from the comfortable ennui of government jobs, can attract an outbreak of politically-motivated thuggery.
But Mr Subramanian's comment, quoting a finding in a book he co-authored with economist Devesh Kapur, merely articulated what has been an open secret among businessmen and port administrators for years. Activity in the 145-year-old British-era facility and the country's only riverine port, which covers two port systems, Kolkata and nearby Haldia, has declined sharply - from a share of 28 per cent in the country's total port traffic in 1960 to eight per cent now. Yet, substantial financial resources are spent, Mr Subramanian pointed out, "to keep alive a river-based port in an era of very large ships" (much of this subsidy is spent on dredging the silt that accumulates in the Hooghly). In 1990, the port handled 21.5 million tonnes of cargo; this peaked at 57 million tonnes in 2007-08 before declining to 41 million tonnes in 2013-14. Though this increase in cargo handling looks impressive, it pales beside Singapore, the world's second busiest port, which handled 291.4 million tonnes in the first half of 2015 alone. Where Kolkata has steadily declined, Singapore, 51 years older and covering a little under 1,500 acres, has become a byword for global efficiency. As Mr Subramanian pointed out, statistics also show that Kolkata Port's economic efficiency was abysmal: its TEU (or 20-foot equivalent unit, a rough measure of cargo capacity), per acre was 60 compared to 20,000 for Singapore. Kolkata Port is not just inefficient by global standards, but also by the relatively poor benchmarks of Indian ports. Barring perhaps Ennore, none of them is close to Singapore's turnaround time for ships of less than a day. But between them, Kolkata and Haldia skew the poor overall average for India's 13 major government-owned ports of 2.59 days, with turnaround times of over three days.
The decline of the Kolkata port system has much to do with the economic decline of eastern India and the rise of militant trade unionism encouraged by three decades of Left rule. But Mr Subramanian presented some useful alternatives if Kolkata port were to stop operations. The vast tracts of land - currently it uses 60 per cent of the area it owns, 20 per cent is rented and 20 per cent vacant - could be used to create a global knowledge hub, tying into the state's well-known but underutilised human capital. The conversion of London's docklands into a picturesque riverfront in the 1980s shows that this transformation is possible. Ms Banerjee could profitably consider imaginative and fundamental reform of an integral part of a city steeped in history.
