MAHENDRA B SHAH Vs. STATE OF GUJARAT

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Gujarat is the principal Maritime State in India. The Gujarat ports play major role in the economic development of the State and due to their favourable location, they serve a vast hinterland over Northern and Central India. It has a long coastline of 1600 km. which is almost 1/3 of coastline of India. The State has 40 ports, one of them being Kandla which is a major port and 11 of them are classified as intermediate ports and 28 are classified as minor ports. This petition is concerned with the port of PIPAVAV which comes under the category of All Weather Intermediate Ports capable of providing direct berthing facilities for ocean going vessels. The port is in the close proximity of Shiyal and Savai Bet. This port has practically no siltation and therefore it is a naturally sheltered deep water and the tranquilt port and therefore capable of providing direct berthing for ocean going vessels. It is noticed that the Kandla port which is the actual major port is handling large volume of cargo traffic and has reached saturation point as ships have to que and the waiting period is long. The existing ports in Gujarat and Bombay are heavily overloaded and some of them are not even equipped with modern facilities to handle the large amount of traffic which is increasing day-by-day. There is, therefore, a lot of congestion in the ports and immense delays in cargo handling. Consequently, the development of coastline by developing the ports into modern ports capable of handling the ever increasing traffic is the need of the day and on this count there appears to be concurrence of opinion amongst the parties in this Court.

(2.) Pipavav port for its better location and absence of siltation is a contributor to the folklore of Saurashtra. Pipavav has excellent naturally sheltered deep waters suitable for the development of a modern State of the Art Sea Port. It has all potentialities of being developed into a full-fledged all weather port. The fact that Pipavav could be developed into full-fledged all weather port also does not appear to be seriously in dispute before me.

(3.) The questions posed in this petition filed by a private individual as a public interest litigation, namely, are: