The state government has chosen a new location to develop a deep-sea port in Bengal after securing the interest of India’s top business conglomerate, the Adani Group, and a crucial no-objection from the Union shipping ministry.
The proposed site is at Dadanpatrabar, 10km north of Tajpur — the place the erstwhile Trinamool government had selected for the project — chief minister Suvendu Adhikari said at Nabanna.
“I had discussions with Karan Adani, managing director of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, last evening and came to know why they had exited the Tajpur deep-sea port project,” Suvendu said.
“The government has no land in Tajpur, and (the project) needs a few thousand acres to develop rail and national highway connectivity and warehouses. As there was no land for these facilities, developing the deep-sea port was not feasible (in Tajpur).”
The Bengal government also announced that the rural job scheme, non-operational in the state since March 2022, would resume from July 1. Panchayat minister Dilip Ghosh said the state was holding discussions with the Centre to restart all the other rural development schemes, including the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, that had remained stalled in Bengal over the past four years.
Earlier in the day, the chief minister had met Union shipping minister Sarbananda Sonowal and junior minister Shantanu Thakur.
Suvendu said the government had enough land at the new location for the initial phases of the port project.
“The industries department has 1,700 acres of land there. We will arrange more land in future as the project progresses. The shipping minister has agreed to give an NOC (no-objection certificate) to the new proposal,” Suvendu said.
Officials said a closed salt factory stood at the new site. It will not be difficult to transfer the land, which is with the commerce and industries department, to the agency that undertakes the project, they added.
“The previous government did not acquire a single acre of land in the state because of its hands-off land policy,” an official said.
“When the previous government learnt that the project would need about 6,000 acres, it should have looked for alternative sites because of its inability to acquire land.”
One key reason that the previous government had selected Tajpur was to keep the project outside the territorial jurisdiction of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, Kolkata (SMPK), run by the central government. A port could not have come up north of Tajpur without an NOC from the SMPK, which reports to Sonowal’s ministry.
The Mamata Banerjee government was wary of seeking an NOC for the project from the SMPK, having earlier failed to secure similar clearances for port projects in Sagardwip and Kulpi. The Bengal government has been searching for an alternative to the Haldia and Kolkata ports, which are unable to handle large ships because of low river draught.
With the Narendra Modi government now willing to give an NOC for the new port, and with 1,700 acres of land in hand, the project now appears more promising than before.
“The technical details of the proposed port are not yet clear but a fresh DPR (detailed project report) will be prepared now,” an official said.
Another official said: “The state government will send a proposal to the Centre to develop the port in a revenue-sharing model with Delhi.”
A fresh start also gives Adani an opportunity to get back into the project.
The Adani Group had emerged as the top bidder for the project on Mamata’s watch, pipping Sajjan Jindal’s JSW Group, and secured a letter of intent in 2022. But Mamata got cold feet when US-based short-seller Hindenburg accused the Adani Group of stock manipulation and accounting fraud in January 2023.
Her government scrapped the agreement in 2025 and floated an international tender, which fell flat for a lack of participants.
The proposed deep-sea port in Tajpur was designed to feature a deep draft — the vertical distance between a ship’s waterline and the lowest point of its hull — of 12.1 metres.
Vessels of up to 100,000DWT (capable of carrying 100,000 tonnes of cargo) would have been allowed to use the port, decongesting the Kolkata and Haldia riverine ports.
Some officials said that bringing the project to fruition would not be a cakewalk for the new government.
“Arranging the remaining 4,000 acres will not be easy as the new government has yet to adopt the land acquisition act introduced in the country in 2013,” an official said.
“The state will have to frame the rules to adopt the act. There’s no such initiative yet.”
Besides, the proposed site is in East Midnapore, which includes Nandigram, one of the hubs of the anti-land-acquisition movement that unseated the Left.
“This is the home turf of the chief minister, too. It’s still unclear how aggressively the new government will go for land acquisition for the project,” a source said.
Suvendu said the previous government had spent ₹30 crore to prepare a DPR that was not feasible at all.