Sustainability versus Progress

And of course, the ports sector must rise to the challenge of accommodating the country’s burgeoning trade. Just how it is coping is the subject of our regional survey this month and it doesn’t always make for comfortable reading. India’s notorious bureaucracy is alive and kicking – kicking against progress in some cases.

But as Gavin van Marle observes, that same bureaucracy goes hand in hand with Indian democracy whereby everyone has their say and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Take the case of the ‘Sethu’ Canal project. If ‘big business’ gets its way, a navigation channel will be blasted through the straits between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka cutting 400 nautical miles – say 36 hours – off the voyage from east to west coast.

Not good news for Sri Lankan port development interests but not good news for the fragile ecosystems around Adam’s Bridge either. As Van Marle points out, if it was China they’d just go ahead and do it. At least in India the issue gets debated.

If we’re talking about sustainability here then the mobile harbour crane, in its way, is a fine example. The MHC, featured in this issue, is certainly an organic, demand-driven answer to the needs of port development – a more sustainable approach than installing a big new terminal replete with post-Panamax STS gantry cranes you could argue. Yet even the lowly MHC is not immune from the ‘keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ phenomenon mentioned by Halcrow’s Richard Clarke in connection with STS gantry cranes in last month’s PS. Your new MHC it seems has to be at least as big as your neighbour’s if not bigger!

Fortunately, to counter our worst excesses, we have the Environmental Impact Assessment. Some see them as a bane, a drag on progress, but as Royal Haskoning remind us in their piece on the environmental and social imperatives of port planning, the only way to ensure long-term social and economic progress is to link it with environmental protection. The trick is to get sustainability and progress working in harmony. Never easy but not impossible.

So many cargo handling equipment manufacturers, consulting engineers, software providers and others who we report on have these issues high on their agendas. Do you? We were surprised at how little attention was paid to the subject at the recent TOC Asia event in Hong Kong. Someone needs to get this well and truly out in the open. The Green Shipping World conference in Amsterdam this month is directed at sustainability but we don’t see any input from the ports sector!