Article - 99 Week 25 OUR SLICE OF THE POLICY PARALYSIS

Article - 99  Week 25

OUR SLICE OF THE POLICY PARALYSIS

Nhava Sheva Terminals are sinking to their all time lows. All three terminals are helpless, clueless, and trudging along aimlessly. The exporters are having nightmares. Some of them are losing their orders. The ships don't get berth easily and when they get they are decreed to limited move-counts, precluding most of the exports. Form 13, Gate Opening & Closing Of Windows at unpredictable timings, SSRs, and shut outs are funnily avoidable relics of the past, and wastefully expensive.

JNPT is a PSU, mired with its inherent culture of unaccountability & speed money issues. Add a dollop of Union strikes or a few sporadic shadow boxing by the local political outfits and you have a sense of perennial semi-paralysis on expected lines. Ironically, when the private Terminals of GTI & NSICT are on a big ticket drive to scuttle their own productivity, JNPT appears to be the neighboring island of hope & promise. 

The big question : Why are these two private Terminals so hooked up on cutting productivity? The popular perception is that these Terminals made obscene amount of profits in the past years due to faulty BOT contracts and TAMP authority came in late to spoil their party - exactly like our Mumbai cops who sadistically tear down any residue of  fun & gaiety among the innocent people in pubs and restaurants, on the basis of badly cooked up rule books of the government. The issue from the authorities and a large section of the public is - 'How can those guys have so much fun, while we are on the drab end of the stick?' Call it jealousy, insensitivity, cruelty, or even policy paralysis. It's the same psyche that has pervaded the administration in our nation. Stop the party! Hang the party goers! Looking from within, TAMP is a futile and thoughtless mechanism to dictate market pricing. Nhava Sheva's Terminals have that vantage position of milking the market. The terminals are few in number and sitting on the (economic & trade) heart of India. Therefore, they can not be perceived as free market players. JNP as the big Daddy just needed to suck in the highest possible share of the revenue earned by the Terminals and sit tight. TAMP is like an vestibular appendix, brain dead from its inception and potentially incapable of being constructive in any manner. With a brain dead organ like TAMP around, no one has the gumption and ability to decide on the matter - not even the judiciary. The toxic end of the policy paralysis is hurting us real bad. Most of the  bureaucratic mechanisms have grown self-destructively comatose, with increasing complexity and hidden motives. Simplicity has been made incomprehensibly opaque, complex, ambiguous, and laboriously long for common mortals like you and me. And the result is the setting in of the paralysis to Nhava Sheva's Terminals. The writing is on the wall. We are building a Kolkata like port out of the fully functional gateway to the prosperity of India's exports. A wild plague of Policy Paralysis is knocking us down in Nhava Sheva.

Brgds

Capt Rath