The Hindu Business Line : Concor halts handling at Coimbatore premises

CONTAINER Corporation of India (Concor), the custodian of the inland container depot (ICD) here, has suspended handling import/ export containers at the ICD premises inside the Coimbatore railway junction.

The ICD management has cited operational constraints as reasons for not accepting export/ import containers being unloaded at the ICD yard.

The Concor has in its latest trade notice maintained that the temporary suspension of container handling operation effective October 2 has been taken under compelling circumstances.

However, the ICD authorities will continue to accept booking stuffed at the shippers' premises/ factory premises under the Central Excise supervision but in this case, these containers would be moved to the concerned gateway ports on the same trailer itself without any handling.

Concor's suspension of container handling at the ICD premises has come as a culmination of severe traffic bottlenecking the ICD authorities had to undergo in the last two months, first by the dislocation of rail-link at the Kochi end due to damage caused by dredger in July last and second by pressures from the Southern Railway authorities to vacate their premises at the Goods Shed Road end here, informed sources in the cargo clearing and forwarding industry say.

With the July rail-link dislocation, the movement of cargo containers from Concor's ICD here by rail drastically fell and the custodian was forced to step up transport of containers by road to the gateway port of Kochi for which bulk of the containerised cargo handled by Concor here are headed.

This shift in the transport mode has of late led to severe constraint for the Concor in arranging trailer-trucks and adequate number of empty containers for stuffing at Coimbatore leading to huge backlog of container clearance, allege the Coimbatore Custom House and Steamer Agents Association.

Southern Railway, which is expanding the train maintenance yard at Coimbatore Junction by adding additional pitlines, has also been mounting pressure by serving notices to Concor to vacate the Goods Shed Road premises. This has put Concor in a cleft, forcing the latter to reduce the volume of container handling load at ICD premises thereby drawing flak from the users of the container depot.

Concor bid to build its own satellite container cargo terminal at the peripheral Irugur, 22 km from Coimbatore, and shift at the earliest its container handling from Railway junction here is only half way through.

Close on its schedule to move to Irugur premises, Concor has now encountered another hitch with regard to securing the Customs field posting at the Irugur terminal. The Customs Department, according to reliable sources, has intimated to the Concor that the posting of Customs official team at Irugur ICD complex would be done on cost recovery basis only and it would no more extend the departmental posting of officials as Concor hitherto enjoyed at the Goods Shed Road premises.

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