Port of Kolkata
The Port of Kolkata, officially Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, is the only riverine major port in India, in the city of Kolkata, West Bengal, around from the sea. It is the oldest operating port in India and was constructed by the British East India Company. Kolkata is a freshwater port with no variation in salinity. The port has two distinct dock systems – Kolkata Dock System and Haldia Dock Complex. As an important riverine port, it provides both domestic and international freight and passenger services, being the terminus of India's longest National Waterway.
In the 19th century, the Kolkata Port was the premier port in British India. From 1838 to 1917, the British used this port to ship off over half a million Indians from all over India – mostly from the Bhojpur and Awadh — and take them to places across the world, such as Latin America and Africa as indentured labourers. After independence, the port's importance decreased because of factors including the Partition of Bengal, reduction in the size of the port hinterland, and economic stagnation in eastern India.
It has a vast hinterland comprising the entire North East of India including West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, North East Hill States and two landlocked neighbouring countries namely, Nepal and Bhutan and also the Autonomous Region of Tibet. With the turn of the 21st century, the volume of throughput has again started increasing steadily. As of March 2018, the port is capable of processing annually 650,000 containers, mostly from Nepal, Bhutan, and India's northeastern states.
History
Early time
In the early 16th century, Since the arrival of the Portuguese, who established the first European contact with Bengal, customs duties collected from trading settlements upstream of the Hooghly River heralded a change in the navigational system of the Ganges. The prosperous Saptagram port at the confluence of the Saraswati and Bhagirathi River was becoming increasingly impassable for ocean-going cargo ships. At this time, the Portuguese first used the present location of the port to anchor their ships, since they found the upper reaches of the Hooghly river, beyond Kolkata, unsafe for navigation. By the end of the 16th century, large Portuguese ships were anchored in Betor. Betor was a place on the outskirts of Kolkata. From Saptagram the goods were ferried by small ships and loaded onto larger ships. In 1570 AD, the Portuguese shifted their trading post from Saptagram to Hooghly, a few miles downstream. Soon Saptagram was replaced by Hooghly as the sea outlet of the region. Hooghly maintained its importance throughout the 17th century. A few decades later, after the Portuguese were driven out by the Mughals in 1632 AD, the Dutch and the English established their trading posts here. But, the trade of Hooghly further downstream, especially as far as Sutanuti and Gobindpur, encouraged the expansion of smaller trading centers and settlements into larger scale activities.Kolkata was a small river port inhabited by weavers and artisans before it was developed as a center for maritime trade by the British East India Company. The port on the Hooghly shore acted as a catalyst in the transformation of the city of Kolkata from a small weaving settlement to a major center of maritime trade in East India. Job Charnock, an employee and administrator of the British East India Company, is believed to have founded a trading post at the site in 1690. Even before settling in Kolkata, the British knew that among the navigable areas of the Hooghly River, the deepest water area is along the eastern bank from Gobindpur to Garden Reach and was easily navigable by large sea-going vessels. Since the area was situated on the river with jungle on three sides, it was considered safe from enemy invasion. From the mid-eighteenth century the growth of Kolkata's port was accelerated by the decline of the Mughal-era major ports of Hooghly on Hooghly River and Surat on the western coast.
Company Rule: 1773–1857
In the early colonial period, the main purpose of the port administration under the company's naval office, headed by a master attendant, was to provide pilotage services to ocean-going vessels. The Master Attendant also regularly conducted river surveys to report on the navigability of the river. The port's lack of docking facilities became a particular concern from the mid-eighteenth century, as ships were taken to Bombay for repairs. In 1790, the first dock was built near Bankshall Ghat. Already in 1781, Colonel Watson was granted a site on the southern boundary of the harbor to build a floating dock. Watson set up a marine yard at Kiddirpor and also began construction of a floating dock in 1781, but was forced to abandon the project when legal disputes arose. Watson subsequently turned to shipyards and built a small number of ships before his retirement from the business. After Watson several steps were taken to establish shipbuilding factories in Kolkata, but none of them were comparable to the shipbuilding activities of Parsi Enterprises in Bombay.In the 1820s, several plans were made to build floating docks in Kolkata and Diamond Harbour, but none of them materialised. When the disastrous cyclone of 1842 caused extensive damage to ships anchored in Kolkata harbour, the issue of dock construction came into discussion again. But modernization of the Port of Kolkata was overshadowed by a failed attempt to establish a new port on Matla River in the 1860s. Port canning scheme is formulated from an alternative thought of the entrepreneurs. From a business point of view, they believed that river silting problems would lead to the premature death of the Port of Kolkata, just as the Port of Saptagram on the Hooghly River had died three hundred years earlier. But Kolkata became a very important city for the British, so they abandoned the plan to establish a port on Matla River. To bring more efficiency to the management of the Port of Kolkata, the government was active in setting up the Port Trust, which provided a solid base for the British Empire's trade in India.
After slavery was abolished in 1833, there was a high demand for labourers on sugar cane plantations in the British Empire. From 1838 to 1917, the British used this port to ship off over half a million Indians from all over India – mostly from the Hindi Belt — and take them to places across the world, such as Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and other Caribbean islands as indentured labourers. There are millions of Indo-Mauritians, Indo-Fijians, and Indo-Caribbean people in the world today.
British India: 1857–1947
As Kolkata grew in size and importance, merchants in the city demanded the setting up of a port trust in 1863. The disastrous cyclone of 1864 caused extensive damage to Kolkata port and the city of Kolkata. During this time ships anchored in Kolkata Harbor were damaged and destroyed. According to the then documents published by the British rulers, at that time the damage in the storm in the city of Kolkata alone exceeded 99 thousand rupees. Belvedere Estate, Judge's Court, European Lunatic Hospital, and many famous institutions of Calcutta were destroyed in the violence of nature. The Hooghly River was witnessing high tides up to a height of about. After this incident there was a strong demand for the construction of a permanent dock. The colonial government formed a River Trust in 1866, but it soon failed, and administration was again taken up by the government. Finally, in 1870, the Calcutta Port Act was passed, creating the offices of Calcutta Port Commissioners. At that time Calcutta port had only four jetties and one wharf for unloading cargo, which could berth 52 ships and had a total capacity of 48,000 tons. In 1871–72, the number of jetties had increased to 6, with a berth of 143 ships and a cargo capacity of 222,000 tons. The length of the wharf also increases significantly. Commodities such as crops, seeds and raw materials and mainly jute products were moved through this wharf. In the 1870s, rapidly increasing tea exports from Assam and North Bengal necessitated the construction of a warehouse on Strand Bank Island.A wet dock was set up at Kidderpore in 1892. This was the result of persistent demands by the merchant community of Kolkata. As cargo traffic at the port grew, so did the requirement of more kerosene, leading to the building of a petroleum wharf at Budge Budge in 1896. The Khidirpur Dock II was completed in 1902. During the twenty years before the World War I, a remarkable development was observed in the import-export sector through the Port of Kolkata. Coastal trade also developed significantly, particularly in the export of coal. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, the government of Eastern Bengal and Assam developed Port of Chittagong as a rival to Kolkata, but it was not very fruitful. In 1925, the Garden Reach jetty was added to accommodate greater cargo traffic.
Although hampered by the Great Depression during the period between the two world wars, the modernization of the Port of Kolkata also took place along with the development of modern industries. A new dock, named King George's Dock, was commissioned in 1928. Though the port was conceived to be a commercial port and gateway of eastern India, the port played a very important role in the Second World War. It was bombed twice by the Japanese forces.
India: 1947–present
The port facilities were devalued during the Second World War, but the Port of Kolkata was revived by economic changes after India's independence. The First Five Year Plan called for the acquisition of new vessels such as dredgers, survey vessels, dock tugs, anchor vessels, light vessels and launches for Port of Kolkata along with other ports in India. The Haldia Dock project was initiated in the Third Five Year Plan to ease the pressure on the Port of Kolkata. The Commissioners for the Port of Kolkata were responsible for the port till January 1975 when Major Port Trusts Act, 1963, came into force. The port is now run by a board of trustees having representatives from the Government, Trade Bodies, various Port Users, Labour Unions and some nominated members. The Farakka Barrage was designed to divert 1,800 cubic meters per second of water from the Ganges into the Hooghly River to remove silt from Kolkata harbor without the need for regular mechanical dredging. The barrage, about 2,304 meters long, began operations on 21 April 1975. After commissioning of the project it was found that the water flow diverted from the Farakka Barrage was not sufficient to satisfactorily desilt the river. On 12 January 2020, the port was renamed to Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of 150 years of operation of Kolkata Port at Netaji Indoor Stadium.The port is part of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road that runs from the Chinese coast via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, there to the Upper Adriatic region of Trieste with its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe.