As India expands its global trade footprint, efficient ports, resilient supply chains and smarter logistics will determine how far and how fast the economy grows.
India’s tryst with the sea is nearly 4,500 years old. The Indus Valley Civilisation built the world’s oldest known tidal dockyard at Lothal around 2300 BCE, shipping beads and textiles to Mesopotamia, while the Chola navy later commanded the Bay of Bengal, carrying Indian trade and culture across Southeast Asia, according to maritime historians. That legacy of seamanship has scaled into a modern economic engine — one now standing at the crossroads of a hiring boom and a technology revolution.
The Numbers That Matter
Nearly 95% of India’s trade by volume and about 70% by value still moves by sea, according to data from the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). Major ports handled 854.86 million tonnes of cargo in FY 2024–25, and total port capacity has nearly doubled to 2,762 million tonnes per annum, even as average vessel turnaround time has been cut from 93 hours to just 48. Total exports of merchandise and services from India reached an estimated figure of $860.09 billion in FY 2025–26, as per data released by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry. Engineering items account for 27% of total exports, and petroleum products, gems and jewellery, medicines, textiles, rice and marine products account for the rest. Crude oil, coal, gold, machinery and electronics make up the bulk of imports. It is because of these facts that the shipping industry is always referred to as the backbone of the Indian economy.
A Job Machine for Young India
What makes the story genuinely appealing today is the scale of opportunity it offers. India has beaten out the more traditionally dominant seafaring countries to emerge as the second largest exporter of seafarers globally, after the Philippines, with more than 3.11 lakh seafarers — 12.16% of the world’s seafaring population — which rose from merely 5.2% in 2015, as per the BIMCO-ICS Seafarer Workforce Report 2026. India had 3.08 lakh employed seafarers in 2025–26, and the number of women seafarers has grown tenfold since 2014 — a sign of how rapidly the sector is opening up. The government’s ambition goes further still: Union Minister for Ports, Shipping and Waterways Sarbananda Sonowal has announced plans to attract ₹80 lakh crore in investment and create roughly 4 crore maritime jobs by 2047 under the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision. The wider maritime economy also supports employment in shipbuilding, ship repair, warehousing, freight forwarding, insurance, green fuels and inland waterways — giving young Indians credible, high-paying, globally mobile career paths well beyond the usual IT and finance tracks.
Automation: A Turbocharger, Not a Threat
The same sector creating these jobs is also being reshaped by automation — and the two trends are working hand in hand rather than against each other. Jawaharlal Nehru Port already operates five automated container terminals with a combined capacity of 10.4 million TEUs, placing it among the world’s top 40 container ports, alongside Mundra Port, which handles 7.4 million TEUs and ranks among the world’s busiest. At the heart of India’s digital push is e-Samudra, a unified single-window portal that lets shipping companies, seafarers and training institutes handle certificates, licences and payments online instead of through fragmented paperwork. A separate Maritime Single Window platform, operational since January 2024, now covers 85 ports nationwide and had pushed vessel compliance rates to 75% by mid-2025, cutting the documentation burden for vessel arrivals and departures.
The next frontier is AI-driven planning: vessel-arrival data, weather, berth availability and yard space can be combined so that a system recommends where a ship should dock and how it should be unloaded, updating the plan as conditions change. With digital twins, port authorities are able to perform simulations for potential disruptions such as late arrival of ships and breakdowns of cranes on a live twin of the port, while sensors fitted to the cranes and conveyor belts can help in predicting machine maintenance requirements.
The automation process does not need to be perceived as a competition between machine and humans; it eliminates paperwork and keeps people away from unsafe lifting areas and, at the same time, it creates a new market for crane drivers, remote control room staff members, robotics engineers and IT analysts. The proper strategy is to both automate and re-skill, which is precisely the idea behind the Maritime India Vision 2030 project in India through training centers with advanced digital simulators. As the ports become more connected, cybersecurity becomes important, because good identity controls and backups prevent any digital errors from leading to physical disruptions.
The Course Ahead
With investment proposals of ₹12 lakh crore made during India Maritime Week 2025 and Sagarmala projects worth more than ₹6 lakh crore, the Indian ports are going to experience ten years of transformation ahead. With government programs like Maritime India Vision 2030 and Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047, the maritime industry is set to meet both ends at the same time – smarter, faster and greener ports along with new jobs for millions of Indians, as the maritime culture of the country moves ahead into a technologically-driven era.
This article is authored By Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Director, IIM Mumbai
