VADHVAN, A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Maharashtra is all set to get India's largest port and first offshore airport in Vadhvan, boosting infra in Navi Mumbai, and spurring two new cities by 2030.

- P.B. JAYAKUMAR

THE FOREST of container-handling cranes that Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA) chairman Unmesh Sharad Wagh can see from his office in Uran, Navi Mumbai, has been overtaken in importance by another forest: of over 100,000 mangrove trees that it has developed to achieve its green goals. Mangroves protect coastlines from erosion, and JNPA has no usable shoreline with the required draft in its current location.

“Here, we can’t expand capacity further, because the waterfront is not available. The city is fast-developing, and this well-planned port has no scope for further development,” Wagh says. When JNPT began operating 36 years ago as India’s first container port, it reported a throughput of 34,000 TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units—the standard 20-foot-long container box used by the shipping industry.

Today, JNPA’s capacity is 10.4 million TEUs, but it handled 7.04 million TEUs in 2024-25. JNPA was ranked 26th worldwide, way behind No. 1, China’s Shanghai, which has a throughput of 50 million TEUs. It handles half of the container traffic at India’s major ports.

The JNPA and Gautam Adani’s Mundra, India’s largest container port, together handle over 65% of the container traffic on India’s western seaboard, the Arabian Sea. India’s container traffic increased by over 70% in the last decade and is expected to reach nearly 26.6 million TEUs by 2028, with an average annual growth rate of 3.1%.

However, with JNPA operating near its optimal capacity, India requires additional container ports.

Wagh, an officer of the Indian Revenue Service, is now tweaking JNPA’s efficiency while spending more time on Vadhvan, a beach village 150 km from Mumbai, near Dahanu in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, where the government plans to build one of the world’s Top 10 ports. Wagh is also the chairman and MD of Vadhvan Port Projects Ltd, a special purpose vehicle formed by the JNPA and the Maharashtra Maritime Board (MMB).