Tuesday Oct 27, 2026
Tuesday Oct 27, 2026
Tuesday, 27 October 2026 02:04 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
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| National Maritime Foundation Director General Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan |
India’s drive to build its own transhipment hubs is not playing out at Colombo’s expense, a leading Indian maritime strategist said, pointing to global shipping lines now investing in ports on both sides of the Palk Strait.
New Delhi-based National Maritime Foundation (NMF) Director General Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan said port connectivity, long a source of anxiety in Sri Lanka, had become the most promising area for maritime cooperation between the two countries.
He was speaking at the 50th webinar organised by the Daily FT, ACCA and the International Chamber of Commerce Sri Lanka, together with WIM, the Sri Lanka Institute of Directors, the MBA Alumni Association of the University of Colombo and Pioneer Institute of Business & Technology, on Saturday. The webinar was titled “In an Emerging New World Order, What Are Sri Lanka’s Options?”
“In India and Sri Lanka, there has been a concern that as India develops its own transhipment hubs, will Colombo suffer?” Vice Admiral Chauhan said. Transhipment is the transfer of cargo from one vessel to another at an intermediate port en route to its final destination, and forms the core of the Port of Colombo’s business.
He said the concern stemmed from how two Indian initiatives were viewed: the maritime policy encapsulated in the acronym SAGAR, and Sagarmala, which he described as India’s mega port connectivity initiative. For a while, in some minds, the two had pulled in opposite directions, with one seeking inclusivity and the other seen as excluding partner countries from the circulation of Indian money, he said.
“But now I think that this is an area, peculiarly enough, which is the most promising for maritime cooperation, and it is already happening,” he said.
Pointing to the major shipping lines, Vice Admiral Chauhan noted that Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) had decided to invest in both Colombo and Vizhinjam, which he described as the Indian port directly competing with Colombo. “This is not playing out as a zero-sum game. Far less is it playing out as a gloom and doom story,” he said, adding that it was an area in which a much greater amount of intellectual capital needed to be invested. Coastal shipping, he said, formed part of the same activity.
His view was echoed by former Sri Lanka Navy Commander Admiral Jayantha Perera, who said Colombo, a global transhipment hub, drew about 80% of its transhipment cargo from India. “So there’s no competition with India. We have to cooperate with India and we must improve our level,” he said, adding that only then could Sri Lanka win the confidence of global shipping.
Admiral Perera said Colombo handled about 9.9 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), the standard measure of container volume, with capacity expected to reach about 11.1 million TEUs with the East and West terminals and about 15 million TEUs with expansion by 2028. Shipping density around Sri Lanka had risen sharply due to the Middle East conflict, with vessels at times having to wait outside port, he said.
Beyond ports, Vice Admiral Chauhan identified disaster response as an area in which India and Sri Lanka were natural partners, “even if for no other reason than misery loves company”, and called for cooperation on human skilling so that human skills augmented rather than were threatened by AI, an area he said was receiving insufficient attention.
He also urged a shift from treating the blue economy as a set of sectors to the “blueing” of the entire regional economy, saying Sri Lanka in many cases held the key, such as in converting shipping, a large polluter, into a greener mechanism by running smaller craft that ply between India and Sri Lanka on electricity rather than fossil fuels.
