Delhi — India wants steel. Not a trickle of ships, not just enough to keep a few trade lanes humming. Thousands, rolled off domestic slipways, flying the tricolor, carrying the commerce of a nation that has finally tallied what dependence costs.
On Wednesday, Narendra Modi’s Cabinet approved a ₹700 billion ($8.4 billion) package to revive the shipyards that once languished in rust.
Reforms go further. India has conferred “infrastructure status” on large ships to make the hulks of steel bankable assets.
The ambition is brazen by 2047, the centenary of independence. India aims to rank as among the world’s Top 5 shipbuilders. It has the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth to match: 105 percent. In just 10 years.
What it has yet have are ships: less than one percent of the world’s fleet, a sliver of output, an empire still reliant on foreign hulls.
That dependence is expensive. India spends $75 billion every year leasing ships crewed and captained under someone else’s command. The pandemic revealed how precarious that was: a billion and a half people, in moments of crisis, left quietly at another nation’s mercy.
This plan is the hedge. Subsidies for domestic yards. Long-term loans for expansion. Training for half a million workers who will turn idle docks into humming engines of industry.
The government has devised a peculiar instrument, “shipbreaking credit note,” allows owners to reclaim 40 percent of a vessel’s scrap value when dismantled in an Indian yard. The credit can be applied toward the cost of building a new ship in India, is transferable, stackable, valid for three years.
The government wants to add 4.5 million gross tonnage, create 3 million jobs, draw nearly ₹4.5 trillion in investment (current output: A tenth of a million).
Contrast the Philippines. Manila boasts of 504,000 seafarers deployed abroad, the world’s largest exporter of maritime labor, while shipyards stagnate back home.
Domestic output is thin and capacity limited. Policy reforms, like the Maritime Industry Development Plan 2024 and the Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Bill 2025, signal ambition but not yet execution.
While India stacks subsidies, financing reforms, green incentives under Harit Sagar and Harit Nauka, the Philippines watches Subic’s resurrection on private capital alone, Cerberus Capital’s P15 billion, however bold.
And yet the stakes are identical. Manila, too, also leases foreign hulls. The difference is that India has made the leap from realization to program.
Manila and Delhi have recently called their partnership what it is: strategic. BrahMos missiles. Joint naval patrols on the horizon. A designation Manila has conferred on only five nations, recognition that commerce and security are inseperable.
Shorelines are lines on a map. West Philippine Sea is a line we cannot defend. Sovereignty is hulls and yards. Soon, India will command the oceans with them. The Philippines, still rich in sailors but poor in ships, may have no choice but to follow.