Indian dockers launched an indefinite strike for more pay yesterday, prompting authorities in some large ports to use naval officers and pilots to ensure essential imports such as oil.
Incoming cargo at several of India’s 11 large ports was hit, while at least 20 people, including four women, were reported injured in Calcutta when police baton-charged strikers demonstrating outside the local port authority headquarters.
There was a backlog of ships waiting to berth at Kandia, Bombay and Cochin on India’s west coast, and at Madras in the south-east, where coal shipments were hit. Officials in Bombay and Kandia, however, said that incoming oil and lubricants traffic - about 45 per cent of cargo - would be affected much less than general cargo handling, which is labour-intensive.
The dockers are demanding a 100 per cent pay increase, instead of the 28 per cent offered by the government. But the strike is also seen as a challenge to plans for reforming the notoriously inefficient ports.
The government of Atal Behari Vajpayee, re-elected last autumn with a working parliamentary majority and committed to liberalising India’s still highly regulated economy, is trying to corporatise the ports. This will entail taking them out of the control of the trusts that manage them, involving private capital in the expansion and modernisation of port facilities, and eventual privatisation.
The estimated 125,000 unionised and 45,000 unregistered dockers appear determined to resist this, as overmanning, along with obsolete equipment and an antiquated tariff structure, has been widely identified as one of the port system’s main problems.
Although cargo traffic has doubled and the turnaround time for ships entering Indian ports has halved since India began gradually to liberalise a decade ago, productivity is still barely a third of that in other Asian ports such as Singapore and Bangkok.
The government’s response to the strike is being closely watched, asthe last Vajpayee administration showed a tendency to cave in under pressure from vested interests. But it stood firm last October against a nationwide truckers’ strike to reverse overdue diesel price rises. It is also encouraging the government of Uttar Pradesh to hold out against power workers striking against the break-up and corporatisation of the local electricity board, an action which is causing acute power shortages across swathes of northern India.
