Andhra Pradesh will soon have a dedicated Maritime Board governing the integrated planning, development and monitoring of all ports including concessions to stakeholders.
The State Government on Friday announced and adopted the A.P. Port Policy 2015 that is aimed at harnessing the advantages of the 974-km long coastline, the third longest in the country which is strategically located to transform the State’s vision of making Andhra Pradesh a gateway and logistics hub. The State targetted to achieve 15 per cent share in cargo handling by 2019 and 25 per cent by 2025.
The State has one major port at Visakhapatnam besides 14 non-major port locations: Bhavanapadu, Meghavaram, Kalingapatnam, Bheemunipatnam, Gangavaram, Nakkapalli, Kakinada SEZ, Kakinada Deep Water, Surasena Yanam/Rawa, Narsapur, Machilipatnam, Nizamapatnam, Vodarevu and Krishnapatnam. In addition, the department of ports is taking up limited operations at the Kakinada anchorage port.
The new policy seeks to address issues and challenges like diversification of cargo, diversity of locations, increasing strategic depth of hinterland, enabling market-oriented development and enabling institutional mechanism. The policy has been proposed with objectives of catalysing large-scale manufacturing-led economic development making the State the gateway by integrating the country into global manufacturing supply chain.
The Government has proposed to make the non-major ports as preferred ports for container cargo from Central and North India besides encouraging greater transparency in port development through private sector. The policy stresses the need for making the ports commercially viable for which an institutional mechanism would be set up for managing concessions.
It seeks to ensure efficient and optimal use of scarce and sensitive coastline and other resources keeping in view the future requirements and national security considerations. The policy envisages planning for efficient utilisation of existing port infrastructure, both common use and captive, thereby enhancing the capital efficiency of the investments.
The policy seeks to ensure that State support including land allotment and other forms of Government investments are minimised and well targeted to yield maximum value for money. Ports would be considered part of logistics supply chain and accordingly, a supply chain perspective would be incorporated in the planning for current ports and future development.
The policy lays emphasis on private sector participation in port infrastructure development besides focus on enabling integrated development of ports along with industries and inland infrastructure connectivity. The policy contemplates creation of multi-modal line and evacuation capacities that precede port development besides connecting the ports to the key markets in their primary, secondary and tertiary hinterland.
Procurement would be undertaken with the help of RFP/RFQs of Union Shipping Ministry or any other model procurement documents that had competitive models with optimal risk sharing mechanism including the model concession agreements. Under the new policy, ports would operate on commercial and non-discriminatory principles with open access to commercial cargo.
Captive ports would be allotted only in exceptional cases and such requests should be supported by appropriate business cases suitably justifying their inability to use existing/upcoming commercial port infrastructure.
The policy would be operational from the date of its notification and its provisions would be reviewed and revised at the end of every five years based on the experience of port development functions in the preceding five years.
