Mumbai Port, also called Bombay Port, lies on the western shore of Mumbai Harbour, a natural deep-water harbour of about 400 km² at the mouth of the Ulhas River estuary on India’s west coast, sheltered by Mumbai’s island city to the west and the Konkan mainland to the east and opening south to the Arabian Sea. Run since 1873 by what began as the Bombay Port Trust and is now the Mumbai Port Authority, it handled 68.63 million tonnes of cargo and 7,874 vessel arrivals in 2024–25, mostly crude oil, petroleum products and other bulk cargo. Its container trade moved across the same harbour in 1989 to Jawaharlal Nehru Port at Nhava Sheva, which handled about 7.05 million TEU in 2024. Together the two ports make the harbour the main maritime gateway of western India, and the port was a primary factor in Mumbai’s emergence as the country’s commercial capital.
Front Bay: an estuary sheltered on three sides
The harbour exists because of how the Ulhas River meets the sea. Near Thane the river splits into two distributaries, Vasai Creek to the north and Thane Creek to the south and east. Thane Creek widens southwards into a broad, deep bay with land on three sides: Salsette Island, on which Mumbai and Thane stand, to the west; the Konkan mainland, now occupied by Navi Mumbai and Uran, to the east; and the head of the creek to the north. Only the south is open, towards the Arabian Sea.
The official name of this bay is Front Bay, because the first settlement on Bombay island faced it. The water on the other side of the island, curving between the old Colaba island and the promontory of Malabar Hill, is Back Bay. The distinction matters: Back Bay opens west onto the Arabian Sea, while Front Bay is enclosed by the island on one side and the mainland on the other. Mumbai is nearly rainless from October to May, then receives most of its average rainfall of about 2,213 mm a year in the monsoon, heaviest in July; on a coast battered by that season, and by occasional cyclones such as the storm of 23 November 1948 with gusts of 151 km/h, shelter is the harbour’s chief asset. The port lists 69 anchorage points and a 30.4 km approach channel, and a pilot is compulsory for every vessel over 100 net tonnes.
The land around the harbour is low. Most of Mumbai sits just 10 to 15 m above sea level on a base of black Deccan basalt, and the eastern shore of Salsette, facing the harbour, is fringed with mangrove swamp. Those mangroves, and the mudflats of upper Thane Creek, now form the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary, notified in 2015 and a Ramsar site since 2022, where the Bombay Natural History Society counted more than 130,000 flamingos in 2022.
Six islands in the harbour, from Elephanta to Jawahar Dweep
Six islands are counted in the harbour, one of them Salsette itself, and the port has put the smaller ones to work. Butcher Island, officially Jawahar Dweep, is Mumbai Port’s oil terminal. Its four jetties, with 12.2 m of water alongside, handle crude oil and refined petroleum products, and the island is closed to everyone but port staff. Liquid chemicals are handled separately at a jetty at Pirpau.
Gharapuri, better known as Elephanta Island, lies just beyond it. Its cave temples, with Hindu rock sculptures carved between the 5th and 8th centuries and two smaller Buddhist caves, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the ferries that carry visitors there from the Gateway of India cross the working harbour. The smaller islands have military uses: Middle Ground carries an old coastal gun battery from which the Indian Navy salutes ships returning from deployment, Oyster Rock is a restricted exercise area, and Cross Island, just off Dockyard Road, still shows the remains of old fortifications.
Seven islands joined into one waterfront, 1534–1845
Mumbai’s port shore was not always continuous. In the 16th century the site was an archipelago, the Seven Islands of Bombay, including Colaba, Old Woman’s Island, Bombay, Mazagaon and Parel, which the Gujarat Sultan Bahadur Shah ceded to the Portuguese under the Treaty of Bassein, signed on 23 December 1534 and carried out on 25 October 1535. As early as 1652 the English East India Company’s council at Surat urged the purchase of Bombay from Portugal because of its harbour. Nine years later the islands passed to England as part of the dowry when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II in 1661, and in 1668 the king leased them to the Company for £10 a year.
The harbour quickly became an industrial one. In 1736 the Company contracted Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia, a Parsi shipwright from Surat, to build ships and docks at Bombay; with his brother Sorabji he completed the Bombay dry dock in 1750, the first in Asia, and his firm went on to build 355 ships, including the first built for the British navy outside England. Bombay-built teak warships went on to feature in wider history. HMS Minden, a 74-gun ship of the line built by Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia, was launched there on 19 June 1810, and HMS Cornwallis, another 74 built of teak in Bombay, was the ship aboard which the Treaty of Nanking was signed on 29 August 1842, ending the First Opium War. Behind the shipyards, reclamation slowly filled the shallow channels between the islands. The work began in earnest with the Hornby Vellard causeway, started in 1782, and by 1845 the seven had become a single landmass, later merged by further reclamation with Salsette, and the eastern side of that new landmass gave the port a continuous frontage on sheltered water.
Wet docks on the eastern shore: Victoria and Indira
Modern Mumbai Port was carved into that frontage. The Bombay Port Trust was created on 26 June 1873 under its first chairman, Colonel J. A. Ballard, and the first of the present docks were built in the same decade, with the engineers Sir John Wolfe-Barry and Arthur John Barry later acting as joint consulting engineers for its expansion. Its main cargo berths were enclosed wet docks set into the reclaimed eastern shore of the island.
Victoria Dock, commissioned in 1891, had 14 berths as of 2008 with a minimum draught of 6.7 m. Like Prince’s Dock, it is semi-tidal, so ships can only enter or leave around high tide. Indira Dock, commissioned in 1914, solved that problem with a lock: its 21 berths, with a minimum draught of 7.0 m, can be reached at any state of the tide. Ballard Pier Extension, on the harbour front, has the cruise terminal and immigration hall.
The enclosed docks also concentrated risk. On 14 April 1944 the British freighter SS Fort Stikine, berthed in Victoria Dock with about 1,395 tons of explosives, 8,700 bales of raw cotton, barrels of oil and 31 crates of gold bullion aboard, caught fire and blew up in two blasts. Between about 800 and 1,300 people were killed, 71 of them firemen, some 80,000 were left homeless, and surrounding ships were sunk. Even so, the port remained India’s pre-eminent commercial harbour through the rest of the 20th century.
Across the water to Nhava Sheva: when the island ran out of room
The same geography that protected the port eventually boxed it in. Mumbai Port’s docks sit on a narrow island city with no space to grow, their minimum draughts of around 7 m suit only small ships by modern standards, and by the 1970s the city’s growth and population pressure were constraining the port. The answer was on the far side of the harbour. On the Konkan shore near the villages of Nhava and Sheva in Uran, the government built Jawaharlal Nehru Port, which opened on 26 May 1989 and took over most of the container trade.
Nhava Sheva has since grown into a set of terminals run by different operators: the original JNPT terminal, with a 680 m quay and three berths; the Nhava Sheva International Container Terminal, commissioned in July 2000 by a P&O-led consortium and India’s first privately managed container terminal; APM Terminals’ Gateway Terminals India, opened in 2006; a smaller Nhava Sheva (India) Gateway terminal from July 2016; and PSA International’s Bharat Mumbai Container Terminal, whose first phase of 2.4 million TEU capacity was completed in December 2017. The port is also the terminal of the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, which carries containers by rail towards north India.
The division of labour across the harbour is now clear. The old port on the island side, renamed the Mumbai Port Authority on 31 January 2022 under the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, concentrates on bulk and liquid cargo, the oil jetties at Jawahar Dweep and passenger traffic, which reached 264,643 people in 2024–25. Nhava Sheva, on the mainland side, takes the boxes. Both still share the same approach from the Arabian Sea and the same sheltered water between Colaba and Uran.
The harbour is now being stitched together from above. The 18.2 km Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, officially named the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Sewri–Nhava Sheva Atal Setu, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 12 January 2024; it crosses Thane Creek north of Elephanta from Sewri in South Mumbai to Chirle near Nhava Sheva, and is India’s longest sea bridge. In a sense it completes what the reclaimers of the 18th and 19th centuries started, turning an estuary of islands into one continuous port region. For the city that grew on those islands, see our guide to Mumbai’s geography; for the harbour-front monument where the Elephanta ferries leave, read about the Gateway of India; and for the sea that the harbour opens onto, explore our article on the Arabian Sea.