Book Review --India Port Report: 10 Years of Reforms and Challenges Ahead

India Port report by I-maritime, Mumbai presents a broader prospect of Indian port sector with a public policy prospective and has integrated focal points of different business entity like, shipping lines, port authority, port operators, logistics agencies and types of cargo transported by individual ports. This report has discussed the port history before and after the liberalized era and has broadly discussed the 10 years of the reforms and challenges ahead. The report says that the problems with the major ports in India have been seen because of political pressures, lack of autonomy, lack of incentives, excess of bureaucracy and hierarchies’ rigidities. The report also admits the fact that the last 10 years of globalization and economic reforms opened different ways to different sectors and port sector has diversified accordingly and has made significant improvement. One of the reasons for diversification of this sector was to increase the export and import relations with other countries and decreasing the public monopoly to make this sector more efficient by allowing the private companies to invest in this sector. This created the urgency of standard cargo handling equipments, modernization of the port systems and transforming this sector from laborintensive to autonomous system in order to decrease the turnaround period and thus increasing the efficiency of ports.