Union Budget: Rs 10K crore for container scheme amid shortage, dependency
The renewed focus on containers comes after Covid-19 and the Red Sea crisis brought to the fore India’s dependency on other countries.
By September, they had fallen by almost 40 per cent from July 2024, returning to January 2024 rates, although they remained more than twice as high as at the end of 2023,’ the World Bank had said following the Red Sea crisis. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Union Budget speech on Sunday, announced a Rs 10,000 crore container manufacturing scheme amid a shortage of shipping containers in India that leads to dependency on China.
The renewed focus on containers comes after Covid-19 and the Red Sea crisis brought to the fore India’s dependency on other countries.
China is the largest exporter of containers and manufactures up to 95 per cent of these boxes, globally. Much of these containers are being manufactured in China by a handful of highly subsidised state-owned enterprises, which have sparked security concerns in the US, EU, and India. The US also initiated plans to de-risk its ports from over-reliance on Chinese containers and cranes. India also began manufacturing containers after 2021.
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