Indian Shipping/Conclusion

Thus has passed away one of the great national industries of India after a long and brilliant history, covering, as we have seen, a period of more than twenty centuries. It was undoubtedly one of the triumphs of Indian civilization, the chief means by which that civilization asserted itself and influenced other alien civilizations. India now is without this most important organ of national life. There can hardly be conceived a more serious obstacle in the path of her industrial development than this almost complete extinction of her shipping and shipbuilding. And yet India certainly is one of the countries which can ill spare a national, indigenous shipping. The sea-borne trade of India is continually expanding, with the result of increasing our dependence on foreign shipping, and for this we have, on a rough estimate, to pay a price of about 25 crores of rupees a year. We have trade relations with every quarter of the globe, not only with the Asiatic mainland but also with Europe and Africa on one side and Australasia and America on the other. ​The total value of this trade is about 344.2 crores of rupees, that of imports being 161.8 crores and exports 182.3 crores, and the entire trade lies at the mercy of foreign shippers, who are at liberty to impose on us whatever freights they wish to charge for the use of their ships. Even in the matter of our coastal or inter-portal trade, which is also expanding, aggregating in value about 46.37 crores of rupees, a policy of free trade is pursued, throwing it open to the shipping of all the world, instead of reserving it, as almost all other countries do, for the national shipping, so that about 85 per cent. is appropriated by foreign shipping, leaving only one-seventh to the native. Similarly our entire passenger traffic is in the hands of foreign shippers: our Mahomedan pilgrims to Mecca and other places; our emigrants and immigrants, numbering on an average more than 25,000 per year; our passengers that voyage within Indian limits, numbering over 15 lacs every year; and, lastly, the outgoing and relieving British soldiers of the Indian Army, numbering more than 25,000 every year, their transport costing annually about ⁠55+1/2⁠ lacs of rupees—all these have to voyage in foreign ships, while even in the matter of the conveyance of mails there is no Indian steamship company that can ​take up the work and appropriate the yearly postal subsidy of 7.8 lacs of rupees that now goes to a foreign company. The extent of our dependence will be evident from the fact that in the oceanic trade, of which the total tonnage is 11,800,000 tons, our indigenous shipping represents only 95,000 tons, or only about .8 per cent.; while of the aggregate tonnage of 29.61 million tons in the inter-portal trade, only 3.24 million tons is our own, and over 89 per cent. foreign. Our national shipping at the present day means only 130 vessels of under 80 tons each, used in the oceanic trade, and 7,280 in the inter-portal trade of the country of under 20 tons each, making up in all the insignificant number of 7,410 vessels, large and small, for a country, or rather a continent, whose seaboard extends over a length of 4,000 miles and upwards. Our shipbuilding now is so contracted as to give employment to only 14,321 men, who build only about 125 galbats a year in shipyards, of which the number is now reduced to only 48, while the aggregate capital yearly invested in shipbuilding may be estimated at between 5 and 6 lacs of rupees.

It goes without saying that in the present state of things it is idle to expect that Indian industry and commerce can advance by leaps and bounds, ​handicapped as they are by the want of a fully developed Indian shipping. It therefore behoves Government and all who are interested in the material progress of India to be fully alive to the importance and necessity of reviving and restoring on modern lines a lost industry that rendered such a brilliant service in the past, and with which are so vitally bound up the prospects of Indian economic advancement.