India, March 2 -- Barely days after this year's Union budget announced a Rs.10,000-crore plan to build shipping containers, Union ministers Sarbananda Sonowal and Ashwini Vaishnaw oversaw the signing of a pact between five national companies and ports to manufacture one million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in the next 10 years.

With such investments, a quiet race is unfolding along 12 major ports and new ones under construction along India's 7500-km coastline to end China's near monopoly in building commercial ships and containers, the bedrock of modern seaborne cargo lines.

The ambition is make the country one among the top five ship-building nations, with gross registered tonnage (GRT) of four million tonnes annually by 2047, t...