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| The Nhava Sheva Port near Mumbai handles about 58 per cent of the entire containerised cargo of the country. This year the output is likely to exceed 200 million Twenty Equivalent Units as against the total 334 million Twenty Equivalent Units that all Indian ports handle.
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| The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) and the Nhava Sheva International Container Terminal (NSICT) run by P & O of Australia, are finding it difficult to cope with the compounded growth rate of 25 per cent to 30 per cent in containerised traffic.
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| Minor ports witnessed a decline of 3 per cent in traffic last year. Bulk of the cargo are mostly handled by them. So, the rush of containerised cargo to major ports continues to prevail.
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| With the Nhava Sheva unable to handle the flood of containers, the shippers, especially from North India might give preference to Chennai, where the handling costs are lowerered by 30 per cent compared to the Nhava Sheva.
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| Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) has reduced the inland haulage rates from Tuglakabad Inland Container Deport to Chennai by about 12 per cent. Yet the Nhava Sheva remains the chosen one, which gets no respite due to close vicinity to North India.
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| The NSICT says that although it handles about 65 per cent of the cargo at the port, it has only about 25 per cent of the land. So, despite getting additional equipment like two QCs, 14 RTGs, one RMGC, three top loaders, two empty loaders and paving all available areas and recruiting more manpower, thereby increasing the cargo handling capacity to 1.2 million Twenty Equivalent Units, the NSICT gets more cargo than it can handle.
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| Moreover, the ICD cargo volumes that have trebled in recent years, take up major space at the port, despite four to five high stacks. The CONCOR is able to move, at best, 11 trains from the JNPT as line capacities have reached their limits.
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| The NSICT closed the gates for export cargoes thrice in July alone. The dwelling time for the ICD cargo has gone up to 12 days and despite its turnaround time of 1.5 days, the pre-berth waiting time has gone up to 11-12 hours. The JNPT has also reached its limits.
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| The JNPT, NSICT and CONCOR blame poor access roads and bridges that deny the option to move the cargo to the nearby Container Freight Stations (CFS) or to the Dronagiri Railway Terminals (DRT).
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| They talk about plans like building more container terminals or railway lines, but these could take at least an year before they are implemented. The shipping lines, meanwhile, are contemplating diverting ships to the Mundra port.
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The Nhava Sheva Customs have now moved to new premises, where there is no power back up for runningthe EDI systems. The server is too slow, the software not updated to keep pace with changing instructions and there aren
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