India must accelerate development of its deep sea ports to catch up with its rapidly growing foreign trade, experts attending a maritime conference said here.

They especially highlighted India's challenge in meeting increasing trade volume which calls for massive improvement in domestic transportation and investments in deep-sea ports for handling large size vessels.

"We are seeing some very exciting developments in India but really to keep pace with the rapid growth in India's foreign trade, more is going to be needed," said Christopher Hayman, chairman of the UK-based shipping industry Seatrade, one of the organisers of the conferences and forums taking place in Singapore this week.

"There is trade growth certainly and it is going to generate huge demand for port facilities, especially the container movement into India," he told PTI.

But the challenge for India would be to set up deep-sea ports with capabilities to handle 18,000 Twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) size ships as the country's trade volume increases rapidly.

"Indian port expansion is on the way, investment is going in (and) infrastructure is being planned. But it is a big challenge for India. For the time being, there is a lot of catching up to do," he stressed.

He also pointed out that the challenge of handling large-size ships was not only for India but for everywhere as global trade volume increases.

Currently, India's containerised trade was being trans-shipped through neighbouring ports, Colombo's deep-sea port being one of them, and Singapore another, he said.

Meanwhile, a port development expert said India has limited locations to set up deep-water ports, except for Mumbai and some of the islands on the East and West coasts.

India's present containerised exports were shipped through feeder vessels to Colombo and Singapore for trans-shipment to the markets in the Pacific and the East Coast of the US.

Likewise, trans-shipment of Indian containerised cargoes was taking place from Dubai for markets in Europe and the US West Coast as well as other destinations, he said.