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Water, air and pipeline transport

Industry and transport in India · Part 4 / 4 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

Major and non-major ports and where they sit in the Constitution, the major ports of each coast, the Major Port Authorities Act (2021), Sagarmala and Vadhavan; inland waterways, IWAI (1986), the National Waterways Act (2016) and NW-1, 2 and 3; air transport, the Airports Authority of India (1995) and UDAN (2016); oil and gas pipelines; and how transport shapes regional development, with PM Gati Shakti.

Parts 1 to 3 followed goods from mines and farms into factories and then along roads and railways. This last part takes up the other modes: sea ports, inland waterways, air transport and pipelines. Each has its own strength. Ships move very large loads over long distances more cheaply than anything else, so most of India's foreign trade by volume passes through its ports. Rivers and canals can do similar work inland at low fuel cost where the water is deep enough. Aircraft are fast but costly, so they carry people and light, valuable cargo. Pipelines push oil and gas across hundreds of kilometres without a truck or a train. The part ends by asking how these modes together decide where development happens.

India's ports fall into two legal groups. major ports are declared by or under a law of Parliament and come under entry 27 of the Union List; all other ports, called non-major or minor ports, fall under entry 31 of the Concurrent List and are in practice developed and licensed by the coastal states through their maritime boards. 'Major' is a legal label, not a measure of size: Mundra in Gujarat, a privately run non-major port, handles more cargo than most major ones. The Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways counts twelve major ports. Most are governed by boards under the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, which replaced the Major Port Trusts Act, 1963 and gave each port authority more freedom to fix tariffs and take decisions. Non-major ports have grown quickly since the 1990s, and Gujarat handles the largest share of their traffic.

On the west coast, from north to south, the major ports are Deendayal (Kandla), Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru (Nhava Sheva), Mormugao, New Mangalore and Cochin. Kandla, a tidal port on the Gulf of Kachchh, was developed after Partition because Karachi, the main port of the north-west, went to Pakistan; it was renamed Deendayal Port in 2017. Mumbai's deep natural harbour helped make the city India's commercial capital, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port across the harbour, opened in 1989 to relieve it, is now the leading container port among the major ports. Mormugao in Goa grew on iron ore exports, and New Mangalore once shipped the ore of Kudremukh. Cochin lies at the mouth of a backwater lagoon that gives it a sheltered harbour. Among non-major ports, Mundra and Hazira in Gujarat and the deep-water Vizhinjam port near Thiruvananthapuram, commissioned in 2025, stand out.

On the east coast, from north to south, the major ports are Kolkata with its downstream dock system at Haldia, Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Kamarajar (Ennore), Chennai and V.O. Chidambaranar (Thoothukudi). Kolkata is a river port on the Hugli, well inland from the sea, and its channel needs constant dredging because the river drops silt; Haldia was built nearer the river mouth to take bigger ships. The Kolkata port was renamed after Syama Prasad Mookerjee in 2020. Paradip in Odisha handles iron ore, coal and petroleum for the mineral belt behind it. Visakhapatnam has a harbour sheltered by a rocky headland and serves the steel plant and ore traffic of the region. Chennai, one of the oldest ports, has an artificial harbour; Kamarajar Port at Ennore, just north of it, was built mainly for coal and to ease Chennai's load. Thoothukudi in the far south serves southern Tamil Nadu.

A port works only as well as the roads, railways and industries behind it. The Sagarmala programme, approved by the Union Cabinet in 2015, is built on this port-led view of development. Its main pillars are modernising ports, connecting them to the hinterland by road, rail, pipeline and waterway, setting up industry close to ports, and developing coastal communities, with coastal shipping and inland waterways promoted alongside. One aim is to cut logistics costs by moving more bulk cargo such as coal by sea along the coast rather than by long road or rail hauls. The newest major port under construction is Vadhavan in Palghar district of Maharashtra, approved by the Union Cabinet in June 2024. It is being built by a company formed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority and the Maharashtra Maritime Board, as a deep-draft port able to receive the largest container ships.

Inland water transport moves goods along rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks. It uses little fuel per tonne, pollutes less and keeps heavy loads off crowded roads, but it works only where the channel stays deep and wide enough through the year; silting, low winter flow, bridges with low clearance and too few terminals have held it back. Under entry 24 of the Union List, Parliament can declare a waterway to be a national waterway, after which the Union regulates navigation by mechanically propelled vessels on it. The Inland Waterways Authority of India, set up in 1986 under an Act of 1985, develops and maintains these routes. For a long time only five national waterways existed. The National Waterways Act, 2016 changed the scale: it declared 106 new ones, taking the total to 111, though only some of them carry regular cargo so far.

Three national waterways matter most for the exam. NW-1 follows the Ganga–Bhagirathi–Hugli system from Prayagraj to Haldia, about 1,620 km, and is the longest. The World Bank-supported Jal Marg Vikas Project is improving navigation on it and has built multimodal terminals, the first at Varanasi in 2018, with others at Sahibganj and Haldia. NW-2 is the Brahmaputra from Dhubri on the Bangladesh border to Sadiya, about 891 km. NW-3 is the West Coast Canal in Kerala from Kottapuram to Kollam, with the Champakara and Udyogamandal canals, about 205 km. The rivers also cross borders: under an India–Bangladesh protocol, vessels move between the Hugli and the Brahmaputra through Bangladesh, the route the cruise ship MV Ganga Vilas took from Varanasi to Dibrugarh in early 2023.

Air transport is the fastest mode and sometimes the only practical one for remote places, but it is costly and carries little freight, mostly high-value goods such as medicines, electronics and perishables. Airways are entry 29 of the Union List, so civil aviation is wholly a Union subject, run by the Ministry of Civil Aviation with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation as safety regulator. The Airports Authority of India, formed on 1 April 1995 by merging the International Airports Authority and the National Airports Authority, manages most airports and provides air navigation services. Since the mid-2000s big airports, starting with Delhi and Mumbai, have been handed to private operators through public-private partnerships. Air India, nationalised in 1953, was sold to the Tata group in 2022.

Flights long clustered on routes between big cities, while many small airports lay idle. UDAN, short for Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik ('let the ordinary citizen of the country fly'), was launched in October 2016 as the Regional Connectivity Scheme under the National Civil Aviation Policy of that year. Airlines bid for routes to unserved and underserved airports; on each route won, they cap fares on a share of the seats, and the Union, the states and airport operators support them with viability gap funding and concessions. The first UDAN flight, between Shimla and Delhi, took off in April 2017. Later rounds added helicopter and seaplane routes and focused on the north-east, the hill states and the islands, where air links open up places that roads and railways reach only slowly.

Pipelines carry crude oil from oilfields and ports to refineries, petroleum products from refineries to markets, and natural gas to power plants, fertiliser factories and city gas networks. They cost a lot to build and serve only their fixed route, but once laid they run day and night at low cost, are not stopped by weather or traffic, and free road and rail capacity. India's first long crude line, built by Oil India in the 1960s, ran from the Naharkatiya field in Assam to the refineries at Nunmati (Guwahati) and Barauni in Bihar. The Salaya–Mathura line takes imported crude inland from the Gujarat coast, and GAIL's Hazira–Vijaipur–Jagdishpur pipeline fed gas-based fertiliser plants. The regulator is the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board, set up under an Act of 2006. In 2019 the Motihari–Amlekhganj line to Nepal became South Asia's first cross-border petroleum products pipeline.

Transport also decides which places can grow. In colonial times ports drew industry to Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, and railways tied the interior to them. The pattern is still uneven: the plains and coasts have dense networks, while the Himalaya, the north-east and parts of central India have thin ones, which raises costs and keeps people farther from markets, schools and hospitals. Each mode is planned by a different ministry, so a container may leave a ship only to wait for a train or a truck. PM Gati Shakti, the National Master Plan launched in October 2021, puts the projects of many ministries on one digital map so that roads, railways, ports, waterways, airports, pipelines and economic zones are planned together. The National Logistics Policy of September 2022 followed, aiming to lower the cost of moving goods through multimodal transport.

The four parts of this chapter form one chain. Raw materials, power and markets decide where factories stand; clusters of factories grow into industrial regions and planned corridors; roads and railways carry goods across the land; and ports, waterways, airways and pipelines link it all to the sea, to distant markets and to energy. The legal pairs are worth holding firmly: major ports, national waterways and airways are in the Union List, while other ports are in the Concurrent List. So are the order of ports along each coast, the stretches of NW-1, NW-2 and NW-3, and the years of the main bodies and schemes: IWAI 1986, AAI 1995, Sagarmala 2015, the National Waterways Act and UDAN 2016, and Gati Shakti 2021.

Exam traps

• MAJOR ports are in the UNION List (entry 27); all OTHER ports are in the CONCURRENT List (entry 31), not the State List.
• 'Major' is a legal status, not size: Mundra, a NON-major private port in Gujarat, handles more cargo than most major ports.
• The Major Port Authorities Act, 2021 REPLACED the Major Port Trusts Act, 1963; do not treat them as two laws in force.
• Kandla was renamed DEENDAYAL (2017) and Kolkata SYAMA PRASAD MOOKERJEE (2020); Thoothukudi's major port is V.O. CHIDAMBARANAR.
• Kolkata is a RIVER port on the Hugli, not a sea-coast port; Haldia was built downstream because of silting.
• NW-1 is the Ganga (Prayagraj–Haldia), NW-2 the Brahmaputra (Dhubri–Sadiya), NW-3 the WEST COAST CANAL in Kerala (Kottapuram–Kollam), not the Godavari.
• IWAI was set up in 1986 under an Act of 1985; the National Waterways Act of 2016 raised the number of national waterways to 111 (106 new).
• UDAN (October 2016) is the REGIONAL Connectivity Scheme; its first flight was Shimla–Delhi (April 2017). AAI dates from 1 April 1995.

Recap

• Ships are the cheapest mode for bulk over long distances; most of India's trade by volume goes through ports.
• Major ports: Union List entry 27, Major Port Authorities Act 2021 (replaced the 1963 Act), twelve in all; other ports: Concurrent List entry 31, run through state maritime boards.
• West coast: Deendayal (Kandla), Mumbai, JNPA (1989), Mormugao, New Mangalore, Cochin; non-major Mundra, Hazira, Vizhinjam (2025).
• East coast: Kolkata–Haldia (river port), Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Kamarajar (Ennore), Chennai, V.O. Chidambaranar.
• Sagarmala (2015): port modernisation, connectivity, port-led industry, coastal communities; Vadhavan (Palghar) approved June 2024.
• Inland waterways: Union List entry 24; IWAI 1986; National Waterways Act 2016, 111 waterways; NW-1 Ganga 1,620 km, NW-2 Brahmaputra 891 km, NW-3 West Coast Canal 205 km.
• Air: Union List entry 29; AAI 1 April 1995; PPP airports from Delhi and Mumbai; Air India to Tata 2022; UDAN October 2016, first flight Shimla–Delhi April 2017.
• Pipelines: Naharkatiya–Nunmati–Barauni (Oil India, 1960s), Salaya–Mathura, HVJ gas line, PNGRB (2006 Act), Motihari–Amlekhganj to Nepal (2019); PM Gati Shakti (2021) and the National Logistics Policy (2022) aim at multimodal planning.

Practice questions

Sources

• Constitution of India, Seventh Schedule: List I entries 24 (national waterways), 27 (major ports) and 29 (airways); List III entry 31 (other ports) — https://legislative.gov.in/constitution-of-india
• Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways: annual reports, major ports, Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, Sagarmala programme, Vadhavan port (Cabinet approval, June 2024) — https://shipmin.gov.in
• Inland Waterways Authority of India: Inland Waterways Authority of India Act, 1985; National Waterways Act, 2016; NW-1, NW-2, NW-3; Jal Marg Vikas Project — https://iwai.nic.in
• Ministry of Civil Aviation and Airports Authority of India: Airports Authority of India Act, 1994; National Civil Aviation Policy, 2016; UDAN Regional Connectivity Scheme — https://civilaviation.gov.in
• Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB Act, 2006): pipeline network; Motihari–Amlekhganj pipeline (2019) — https://mopng.gov.in
• Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Logistics Division: PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan (October 2021) and National Logistics Policy (September 2022) — https://dpiit.gov.in