Power, pelf and privilege: these are the attributes that exemplify industrial monoliths. They run sprawling businesses, enjoy political patronage, wield monetary clout, and ride roughshod on competition. The big fear is that India is going down a perilous path by conjuring industrial monopolies. The system perpetuates the inequalities through entry-level restrictions and excessive regulation. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in the port sector where the Adani Group has crafted a necklace of 14 ports and terminals along India’s coastline. India’s largest port operator now controls close to 25% of the country’s shipping cargo volumes. It has got to a point where the Adani-owned Mundra port has handled more cargo than any of the 12 major ports owned by the Centre.

That bravura performance has been possible through a mix of acquisitions and winning concessions to build new ports. In the past decade, the Adani Group has acquired four ports in the east coast and one in the west; it is constructing a port in Vizhinjam in Kerala and has won the mandate to build a deep-sea port at Tajpur in West Bengal. A brokerage report recently suggested that the skewed nature of cargo-handling capacity favouring the west coast would be corrected when these ports start attracting cargo. In 2017-18, the cargo-handling capacity in the west was 310 million metric tonnes against a mere 60 million tonnes in the east. By the end of this fiscal, it is likely to become more equitable: 355 million tonnes in the west versus 247 million tonnes in the east. This phenomenal expansion has, however, kindled a fear that the rise of this new colossus heightens the risk of dominance in a critical sector, with bad outcomes for users.

Dominant players are emerging in other sectors too with the abridgement of choices for the customer. A wave of consolidation and exits in the telecom sector — it once housed close to 20 players — has telescoped competition, virtually turning
it into a slugfest between Reliance’s Jio and Bharti group’s Airtel with Vodafone Idea trapped in its own battle for survival. Jio has said that it has no intention of raising the tariff for its 5G services and will look to grow by inducing users to increase their data consumption. It is a strategy that the Reliance Group has successfully used before to wear down its rivals. However, the elimination of competition raises a welter of issues, stemming from a probable abuse of dominance once competition is killed. The competition regulator, which has slapped penalties on companies like Google and Amazon for anti-competitive practices, needs to start looking a little closely at the local titans as well.