Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to attend the groundbreaking ceremony of the proposed Vadhavan Port Friday. It is touted to be India’s largest container port once ready, and will be built in Maharashtra’s Palghar district.
However, the project, staunchly opposed by a section of the local villagers in Vadhavan and its surrounding hamlets, went through several twists and turns before reaching this stage.
The Vadhavan Port was first proposed by the Maharashtra government in 1997, but the plan was shelved in 1997-98 following stiff opposition to the project by local villagers. It was brought back to the table in 2015 under the Narendra Modi-led government’s ‘Sagarmala Programme’, which aims to push a port-led economy approach, making major ports significant contributors to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
In the past nine years, too, the project has seen several rounds of protests every step of the way, becoming a sensitive issue in Palghar district, located just outside of Mumbai.
The project has also become a political flashpoint in the region, with Uddhav Thackeray having thrown his weight behind its critics. In a rally ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in Boisar in the Palghar district, Thackeray claimed credit for listening to the protesting fisherfolk and tribals and scrapping the project once in 1997 when the government of the undivided Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power. He also vowed to scrap the project again if elected to power.
Thackeray’s party went on to lose the Palghar Lok Sabha seat to the BJP this year. Hemant Savra of the BJP trumped Bharti Kamdi of the Shiv Sena (UBT) in five of the seat’s six assembly segments.
However, in Dahanu, where the Vadhavan Port is proposed to come up, Kamdi edged out Savra, getting 83,882 votes to the latter’s 83,000, according to Election Commission data.
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The all-weather, deep draft Vadhavan Port
The Vadhavan Port, estimated to cost Rs 76,220 crore, will be the third major port in Maharashtra along with the Mumbai Port and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port. It will come up in the Dahanu Taluka of Palghar district. The all-weather port, which will be jointly developed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority and the Maharashtra Maritime Board, is expected to sprawl over an area of 17,471 hectares, of which 16,906 hectares will be within the port limits.
The proposed port will relieve the Jawaharlal Nehru Port of some pressure.
The location of the proposed Vadhavan Port is considered advantageous as it will connect a large landmass of India. It will be close to Gujarat, Rajasthan and central India, and also to most of India’s cargo destination locations.
Moreover, the port, whose construction will involve the reclamation of 1,448 hectares from the sea, has been planned at a location with a deep draft (vertical distance between waterline and bottom of the ship or vessel) of 20 metres.
None of the major ports in India currently has a comparable draft, which limits the berthing of mega shipping vessels and results in certain shipping lines bypassing India.
The Jawaharlal Nehru Port, which is so far the largest container handling port in India, has a draft of 15.5 metres.
The Vadhavan Port is expected to handle 23.2 million twenty-foot-equivalent units (TEUs) a year. A TEU—a standard unit of measurement to determine container capacity—refers to a shipping container that is 20 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) had in 1991 declared the Dahanu Taluka an ecologically sensitive area and imposed restrictions on setting up industries that can have adverse effects on the region.
In 1997, the MoEF forwarded the Maharashtra government’s proposal for the Vadhavan Port for consideration to the Dahanu Taluka Environmental Protection Authority (DTEPA), whose observations were instrumental in the project being shelved.
The DTEPA had in its September 1998 meeting termed the port project “impermissible”, saying that Dahanu was one of the last surviving green zones in an ecologically fragile area.
The protests, and the twists and turns
It was only in 2015 that the Vadhavan Port project got a fresh lease of life when the Modi-led government proposed it as part of its Sagarmala Programme. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority and the Maharashtra Maritime Board formed their joint venture to implement the project in 2016 and the first detailed project report was completed in 2018.
The Union cabinet gave its ‘in principle approval’ to the project and notified the proposed Vadhavan Port as a major port in February 2020.
While all this was happening, voices of stiff resistance from locals had started gaining ground. On multiple occasions over the past nine years, residents of villages where the port is proposed to come up, unitedly came out in protests, blocked highways and sat on symbolic hunger strikes to convey their opposition to the project. The protestors, who included tribal people, farmers, and fisherfolk, often carried a banner saying, “Ekach Zidda Vadhavan Bandar radda (We have only one demand, scrap the Vadhavan Port)”.
The local detractors of the project, who have organised themselves under the banner of ‘Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti’, have a long list of problems with the project.
In a manifesto that they have advertised on their Facebook group, the committee talks about how the reclamation of the project will change the tidal patterns along the coast and could cause the coastal villages to be inundated.
They fear that the port project will hamper the coastal tourism industry in villages such as Vadhavan, Parnaka, Narpad, Bordi, Chikhale, Shirgaon and Saatpati. They fear that the project will involve hill-cutting around their villages.
Vadhavan, they say, is a fish seed centre, which will be impacted if the port project takes off.
The group of protestors instead suggest that the area, where aquatic life such as corals, starfish and dolphins are often seen, be designated a coastal sanctuary to boost tourism.
In April 2020, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) declassified ports, harbours and jetties from the list of “industrial activities”.
After this decision, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) clarified that port projects can be undertaken in ecologically sensitive areas, raising alarm among the critics of the Vadhavan Port project, who approached the National Green Tribunal (NGT).
The NGT asked the MoEFCC to re-evaluate its decision, following which the latter brought in the Chennai-based National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) for a fresh assessment. In May 2022, the MoEFCC issued an office memorandum saying that based on the NCSCM’s findings, setting up a port in the ecologically sensitive Dahanu Taluka can be permissible subject to Coastal Regulation Zone and DTEPA clearances.
In July 2023, the same DTEPA, which in 1998 denied its approval for the Vadhavan Port, granted permission for an all-weather deep draft port at the site.
The Conservation Action Trust, a non-government organisation, filed a petition challenging the DTEPA’s approval for the project in the Bombay High Court. The court, however, dismissed the petition in April 2024, saying that the DTEPA had considered all relevant aspects before making this decision.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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