The Hindu Business Line : Star Track CFS starts operations at Dadri

STAR Track Terminals Private Ltd, a container freight station (CFS) jointly developed by Maersk India Pvt Ltd and railway PSU Container Corporation of India Ltd (Concor) within the inland container depot (ICD) complex at Dadri in Greater Noida, UP, commenced operations as a common user facility.

The CFS was inaugurated by Mr Bendt Bendtsen, Deputy Prime Minister of Denmark, on Saturday. This is the first of the three joint ventures, set up by Concor with private container shipping lines for developing a CFS at its Dadri ICD Complex, to start operations. The other joint venture CFS being developed with the Transworld Group and APL (American President Lines) are expected to start operations in 2005.

The new CFS is expected to provide the much-needed flexibility to the beleaguered trade in North India in sending their cargoes through ports other than the heavily congested and still much-preferred Nhava Sheva container terminal in Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT).

"Given the congestion at Nhava Sheva, the newly-opened CFS at ICD Dadri will help the trade in North India to consolidate the cargo here rather than pile them up at JNPT and send them through other ports such as Mundra, Pipavav or Visakhapatnam. This will give greater flexibility to the growing Northern India trade in using other ports instead of getting stuck at Nhava Sheva or JNPT," Mr Hans Ole Madsen, Managing Director, Maersk India Pvt Ltd, told Business Line during a function to inaugurate the CFS facility.

While the adjoining rail terminal will provide rail link to ports such as Mundra, Kandla, Pipavav, JNPT/NSICT, Chennai, Vizag and Kolkata, the Dadri terminal also has the advantage of road movement across major trading centres covering Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

The CFS of Star Track Terminals is located on 45,000 sq metres of land inside the Dadri complex with a capacity to accommodate 75,000 to 1,25,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) per annum in the first stage. As per the joint venture agreement, Star Track Terminals has the right to develop a further 20,000 sq metres of land and expand the CFS which will increase the total capacity to 1,50,000 TEUs, said Mr Madsen.

The ICD complex at Dadri, spread over 110 hectares, is being developed as an alternative to Concor's flagship ICD at Tughlakhabad near Delhi mainly to cater to the growing needs of international trade in Northern India.

The CFS will provide modern facilities for container handling, custom-bonded warehousing and other value-added services to container trade such as fully computerised system for cargo and yard management, security with armed guards, CCTV and access control and customs clearance facility at site with EDI linkage when commissioned.

It will also provide equipment such as reach stackers, prime movers, chassis and weighbridge, 100 per cent power back-up, besides cargo track and trace facility on the Web site, garments on hangers, shrink wrapping, bar-coding, labelling and ticketing, secure enclosure for high value cargo, reefer points, run check and 24-hour monitoring.

Maersk India is a fully owned subsidiary of the A.P. Moller-Maersk Group of Denmark.

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Star Track CFS starts operations at Dadri