Page 78: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (August 2014)

78 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News ? AUGUST 2014 Nadu in South India. But they have end-ed up facing a slump like the others and are putting up a bold front to improve their lot, much the same as other major private builders including Bharati Ship-yard, ABG Shipyard and Modest Infra- structure. The Defense Ministry and the Coast Guard has been able to come to their assistance in the past few years placing orders to meet their require-ments. But Anand Sharma of Mantrana Ad- visory, a leading consultant in the mari- time Þ eld points out, ?There are plenty of new building orders in the pipeline from the Indian defense sectors. How-ever, the infrastructure with the Indian shipyards is far higher than what can be met by defense new building orders. Hence, defense orders would certainly provide some cushion to Indian Ship-yards. It is not going to increase their capacity utilization completely. More- over for all high-end ships in the defense sector, Indian Shipyards have neither the desired technology nor the know-how to build them.? Help ArrivesBut as all ?bad things? too, come to an end, the recent budget of the Narendra Modi?s Government has brought back the lost smile on the faces of India?s ship builders. The trade and industry pundits are elated having Narendra Modi as the prime minister, since he has been instru- mental in bringing about vibrancy in his home state ? Gujarat, where he was the Chief Minister for over two decades un-til he relinquished the post to take over as PM last month. The country?s focus is on him for replicating the model of his home state for the rest of the country in general and in ship building and repair industry in particular. Several measures and policy changes have been brought into place in the budget of July 10, 2014. The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced in his budget speech that the government will unveil a comprehensive policy to pro-mote Indian shipping and ship build-ing. He has promised to do away with the plethora of taxes that hound Indian shipping. He announced a reduction in taxes for the coastal shipping sector to encourage growth in transport of goods on local routes through coastal ships. The setting up of 16 new ports at a cost of $1.85B and the announcement of put-ting in place of 24 x 7 customs clearance facility in the major ports as well as a single window facility would greatly fa-cilitate India?s international trade as well as coastal. A major boost is the project on the river Ganges called ?Jal Marg Vikas? (National Waterways ? I). This involves developing the waterways from Alla- habad in Uttar Pradesh to Haldia in West Bengal covering a distance of 1,620 km to enable commercial navigation of at least 1,500 tonne capacity vessels and help boost capacity hauling goods along the inland waterways. The project is to be completed within six years at an esti-mated cost of $0.7 billion.MR #8 (74-81).indd 78MR #8 (74-81).indd 788/5/2014 9:53:45 AM8/5/2014 9:53:45 AM