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P. Manoj

New Delhi , June 15

FOLLOWING protests from private container terminal operators, the Shipping Ministry has reversed its earlier decision allowing state-owned Container Corporation of India Ltd (Concor) to handle containers at Paradip Port.

After reviewing the in-principle approval granted last year to the plan, the Shipping Ministry informed the Port Trust that it was not in favour of giving the deal to Concor on a departmental basis and suggested that the contract should be awarded on the basis of open competitive bidding, a Ministry official told Business Line.

Private terminal operators had protested the Ministry's in-principle approval allowing Concor to handle boxes at Paradip Port arguing that it would be detrimental to their interests given its status as a monopoly rail hauler of containers to and from the ports.

" What can the Government do, if after getting the contract, Concor starts diverting its trains to Paradip Port at the expense of other container terminals in the region", a private operator asked.

Concor has refuted this charge saying that as a public sector unit (PSU), it cannot afford to discriminate. " We have to service all the ports. Whoever gives us volumes will get priority", a Concor official said.

But the Port Trust is not keen on adopting a tendering process as suggested by the Ministry, to identify a private operator to handle boxes at one of the existing multi-purpose cargo berths in the port.

" Under the original plan, the Port Trust was not thinking of giving the berth permanently to Concor for container handling. If the need arose, we could ask Concor, being a PSU, to give the berth to us for handling bulk cargoes. But, if the contract is awarded on the basis of tender, the private operator would not be obliged to give the berths to Paradip Port Trust for handling bulk cargoes", a Port Trust official said.

The Port Trust reckons that it would have derived immense benefits by awarding the deal to Concor, including connecting the port to different inland container depots (ICDs) to augment its container traffic from the existing level of around 400 twenty-foot equivalent units. Concor was also keen on operating from Paradip being a centrally-located deep-water port with a fully electrified railway route having good connectivity to various ICDs.

Moreover, if the open tendering system were followed, it would have required the Port Trust to give three out of its seven general cargo berths to the private operator for handling containers. ``This would have meant sacrificing our existing bulk cargo business in favour of a new cargo that the Port Trust is not handling much at the moment. Consequently, the existing bulk cargo business of Paradip Port may get diverted to other ports. So, we think it is not a good business proposition to award the deal on the basis of tender,'' the official explained.

In the wake of the Ministry directive, the Port Trust is now planning to build two new general cargo berths that will exclusively cater to clean cargo as well as containers at an estimated cost of around Rs 100 crore.

``We will either find a build-on-transfer operator to build, operate and manage the two berths or we will build the berths ourselves and then invite bids from private operators to operate and manage the berths. A final decision on the course to be followed will depend upon whether private operators are readily available to come forward and build the berths,'' the official disclosed.

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