India’s maritime makeover

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about India dreaming of owning the sea, and then we'll talk about why protein powder is getting expensive. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Tuesday, 16th June. Coming to the first story. Picture a container leaving a garment factory in Tirupur packed with T-shirts bound for Rotterdam. It moves by road and rail to a port on the western coast, waits its turn, gets lifted onto a ship. And from that point on, when it touches the water's edge, almost everything about the journey belongs to another country. So the ship carrying the shipment is almost certainly foreign flagged. Indian ships carry only about 5% of the country's export and import cargo, and that ship probably doesn't head for Europe. Instead, the container is likely transshipped from a nearby port in another country like Sri Lanka or Singapore, as three-quarters of India's long-distance shipments are. A foreign flagged ship financed and insured from abroad then carries it to its destination. So the bulk of India's trade crosses the sea, but the entire infrastructure carrying it, the ships, the hubs, the insurers, comes from other countries. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we've made a strong push to upgrade our port infrastructure. The Mundra Port, the Pipavav Port, and the Jawaharlal