( 1 ) GUJARAT is the principal Maritime state in India. The Gujarat ports play major role in the economic development of the State and due to their favourable location, they serve a vast hinterland over northern and Central India. It has a long coastline of 1600 km. which is almost 1/3 of coastline of India. The State has 40 ports, one of them being Kandla which is a major port and 11 of them are classified as intermediate ports and 28 are classified as minor ports. This petition is concerned with the port of PIPAVAV which comes under the category of All weather Intermediate Ports capable of providing direct berthing facilities for ocean going vessels. The port is in the close proximity of Shiyal and Savai Bet. This port has practically no siltation and therefore it is a naturally sheltered deep water and the tranquilt port and therefore capable of providing direct berthing for ocean going vessels. It is noticed that the Kandla port which is the actual major port is handling large volume of cargo traffic and has reached saturation point as ships have to que and the waiting period is long. The existing ports in gujarat and Bombay are heavily overloaded and some of them are not even equipped with modern facilities to handle the large amount of traffic which is increasing day-by-day. There is, therefore, a lot of congestion in the ports and immense delays in cargo handling. Consequently, the development of coastline by developing the ports into modern ports capable of handling the ever increasing traffic is the need of the day and on this count there appears to be concurrence of opinion amongst the parties in this Court.

( 2 ) PIPAVAV port for its better location and absence of siltation is a contributor to the folklore of Saurashtra. Pipavav has excellent naturally sheltered deep waters suitable for the development of a modern state of the Art Sea Port. It has all potentialities of being developed into a full-fledged all weather port. The fact that pipavav could be developed into full-fledged all weather port also does not appear to be seriously in dispute before me.

( 3 ) THE questions posed in this petition filed by a private individual as a public interest litigation, namely, are: (I) Whether an agreement to develop a port can be entered into or contract of development of port can be entrusted to one selected private party without following the procedure of issuing advertisement and inviting offers from all the eligible contenders so as to exclude large number of eligible parties from consideration while contracting for the state largesse thereby denying the opportunity of at least being considered for entrustment of such largesse to all eligible candidates ? (II) Whether the privatisation of ports by permitting development of port by private parties is permissible in view of the provisions of Gujarat Maritime Board act, 1981 read with Indian Ports Act, and whether such privatisation of ports would run counter to the provisions of gujarat Maritime Board Act (hereinafter referred to as "g. M. B. Act") ?

( 4 ) BEFORE I proceed to deal with the aforesaid two questions which are raised for my consideration in this petition, it must be stated that this petition is decided at the admission stage only. Wide publicity was given to the lodging of this petition in this Court and hence the State of gujarat, Gujarat Maritime Board and Sea- king Engineers Ltd. have appeared and filed their detailed affidavits-in-reply and i have heard the learned Counsels appearing for all the parties at length. Therefore, though the petition is not formally admitted, after full-fledged hearing and after taking into consideration all the submissions made by the parties at length this petition is decided by this order. Factual Matrix: (I) For appreciating in proper perspective the aforesaid questions it would be necessary to set out hereunder the relevant facts: (a) The State Legislature has enacted the Gujarat Maritime Board Act, 1981 to mak