Revised 21 September 2026 · v1.1.0 · what changed

Between March and August 2025, without much notice outside trade and legal press, Parliament repealed and replaced four of India's oldest surviving pieces of commercial legislation — two of them literally still in force from before the Republic of India existed. The result is one of the most complete legal overhauls any Indian sector has had in decades: every major statute governing who can carry cargo by sea, under what liability rules, on what paperwork, and under which flag, rewritten in a single parliamentary sprint. What it does not change, on its own, is the actual competitive position of the ships doing the carrying.

Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai — India's busiest container gateway, where the four rewritten shipping Acts now apply, though most cargo still moves on foreign-flagged tonnage. Source: Event Horizon 299792, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Four laws, four Acts, one five-month sprint

Two of the four — the Carriage of Goods by Sea Bill and the Merchant Shipping Bill — cleared both houses of Parliament on the same day, described in official coverage at the time as a first for the shipping ministry. All four received presidential assent within a four-week window in the middle of 2025.

What the rewrite doesn't touch: who actually carries India's trade

None of these four Acts changes the underlying commercial reality they operate on top of. Foreign-flagged and foreign-owned carriers handle the large majority of India's trade by volume; Indian-flagged vessels carry only around 4–5% of the country's own overseas cargo. As of December 2025, India's shipping fleet stood at 1,592 vessels totalling 14.02 million gross tonnes — about 2% of world tonnage. The financial consequence is direct: India pays close to $75 billion a year in freight to foreign shipping lines to move cargo that includes crude oil, natural gas, coal and urea — imports the country cannot do without, carried overwhelmingly on ships it does not own or flag.

The separate bet on changing that number

The government's response to the cost gap runs on a different track from the four Acts: a $20 billion investment roadmap announced in 2025 covering shipping infrastructure, shipbuilding capacity, port digitisation and green marine fuels, alongside specific fleet targets — re-flagging 300 foreign-owned vessels under the Indian flag by 2030, and adding roughly 100 more ships to the merchant fleet over five years. These are subsidy and investment programmes running alongside the legal overhaul, not something the four Acts themselves fund or guarantee. One piece of that roadmap now has published operating rules: the ₹25,000 crore Maritime Development Fund's Guidelines, approved by Cabinet on 24 September 2025, are covered in detail — fund structure, hurdle rates, priority sectors, governance — in MoPSW's ₹25,000 Crore Maritime Development Fund Has Guidelines Now. Here Is What It Actually Commits To (this blog's own reporting).

The net read

Legal modernisation here is genuinely complete: four Acts, up to 169 years of legal vintage retired, inside five months, with international alignment built into the replacement texts rather than left for a later amendment. Economic modernisation is a separate, much slower project. The law now permits and even encourages more tonnage to fly the Indian flag; it does not change the 16–20% cost penalty that made shipowners avoid that flag in the first place. Whether India's own ships start carrying more of India's own trade will show up in the fleet and freight numbers over years, not in the fact that the statute book changed in 2025.

Sources: PRS India's bill-tracking pages for the Coastal Shipping Bill 2024, Merchant Shipping Bill 2024, Carriage of Goods by Sea Bill 2024/2025 and Bills of Lading Bill 2024/2025, cross-checked against PIB press releases and each Act's Wikipedia infobox for exact passage and assent dates. What changed in each Act (structural condensation, IMO alignment, coastal-licensing removal, cargo-liability and shipping-document modernisation) per legal-industry summaries (SCC Online, Mondaq, Lexology, Vajiram & Ravi). Fleet size, tonnage share, the ~$75 billion freight-outflow estimate and the 16–20% flag cost-differential per Indian Shipping Statistics/DG Shipping data as reported in trade press (ITLN, Marine Insight, Business Standard) and ICRA's March 2025 shipping-sector note. The $20 billion investment roadmap and the 300-vessel/100-ship targets per PMIndia and related trade coverage. None of these secondary figures were independently re-verified against DG Shipping's own published statistics for this post.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.