For decades, India was forced to pay foreign ports over $200 million every single year just to export its own goods. Because Indian ports lacked the depth to dock ultra-large container ships, 75% of India’s transshipment cargo had to be sent to middlemen ports in Colombo, Singapore, and Dubai first. To permanently break this dependency, India built Vizhinjam Port in Kerala—the country’s very first dedicated deepwater transshipment port. Strategically located just 10 nautical miles from the world’s busiest east-west international shipping lane, this mega port allows global giants to pull over, unload, and go without ever losing time.
Inaugurated at a cost of ₹8,800 crore, Vizhinjam is already making history by seamlessly docking behemoths like the MSC Turkiye, a vessel carrying over 24,000 containers that literally could not physically fit anywhere else in India. Operating as India’s first semi-automated port with an AI-driven control room and an indigenous traffic management system, Vizhinjam is already scaling up. Watch this video to see how a planned ₹9,700 crore Phase 2 expansion will supercharge its capacity to 5 million containers by 2028, saving millions for Indian exporters and cementing India’s dominance in global trade!
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