Terminal affliction

India is staring at an incipient - and significant - overcapacity at ports. It's time to alter the sail

India’s port traffic grew at a mere 4 per cent annually to a shade over one billion tonne in the five years to fiscal 2016 because of sluggish global trade. In the same period, port-cargo capacity rose faster, at 9.5 per cent, to touch 1.7 billion tonne.
 
What happened next was no surprise: capacity utilisation dropped like a stone, from 78 per cent to 62 per cent. There’s more: India’s container throughput today is close to 13 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), while capacity is 50 per cent more at 21 million TEUs.
 
The upshot? Just 65 per