WASHINGTON: Investments in setting up ports and large industrial cities near them can help push economic growth by up to 1.4 percentage points, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said. “GDP can grow by 1.3-1.4 percent more if we can do several things like investing in ports and port connectivity and also by creating very large industrial cities linked to the ports,” Kant told PTI on the sidelines of the maiden Maritime India Summit here.
He said a huge number of containers can be handled at such cities and there can be other backward linkages as well on manufacturing and logistics. Inaugurating the Maritime India Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the government will invest Rs 1 trillion in the ports sector over the next decade to make the 7,500-km long coastline an “engine of growth”. “Our vision is to increase port capacity from 1,400 million tonne to 3,000 million tonne by 2025.
We want to mobilise an investment of Rs 1 trillion in the port sector to enable this growth,” Modi said, adding the government will be setting up five new major ports. The country is the fastest growing major economy in the world and is slated to clock a GDP growth of 7.5 percent in 2016-17, as per RBI estimates.
The government, however, wants to take it beyond 8 percent in the medium-term and into double-digits over the long-term, given the very unique position the country is in in terms of demographics and faster urbanisation. When asked about the slump in exports, Kant said irrespective of such data flows, we should continue to push our exports.
Kant further said the world economy will not be the same forever and once the conditions improve, India can benefit the most. To a query on divestments, Kant said the Niti Aayog is working on a comprehensive report and has started collecting the data. “Niti Aayog has just been given the task of working on this and we’ve done a lot of spadework and we will be sending our recommendations,” he added.
