The Hindu Business Line : Ports: Focus on capacity addition

With the capacity requirement for major ports set to increase from 400 million tonnes to 917 million tonnes by 2013-14, and box cargo, in particular, poised to jump from 50 million tonnes to 235 million tonnes, the accent on expansion of port infrastructure in the next few years will be significant.

THE cargo handled by the 13 major ports in India might have increased by over 100 million tonnes in the last five years, but during this period, just 23 new berths have been added. Surprising, but true.

Clearly, the ports were able to ramp up their throughputs more through improvement in handling than addition of physical infrastructure. And now that their capacities are over-stretched, the Shipping Ministry's accent in the next few years will be on expansion of port infrastructure in the form of adding new berths.

The major ports had a total of 204 berths in 2000-01, when it handled a combined throughput of 281 million tonnes. Last fiscal, the total number of berths increased to 227, while the combined throughput increased to 383 million tonnes.

Statistics compiled by the Indian Ports Association (IPA) show that the capacity addition in coal handling was to the extent of 32.20 million tonnes in the last five years, followed by petroleum products with 28.85 million tonnes and container tonnage of 20.65 million tonnes.

"There is no doubt that we will have to add new berths in our ports at a faster pace to meet the increased requirements in the next few years. The National Maritime Development Programme (NMDP) envisages a capacity addition of about 520 million tonnes over the next eight to 10 years," says Mr. R.K. Jain, Managing Director, IPA.

As per the NMDP, the capacity requirement for major ports is likely to increase from the existing 400 million tonnes to 917 million tonnes by 2013-14. Understandably, the maximum capacity requirement will be for container cargo — the requirement is likely to go up from the existing 50 million tonnes to 235 million tonnes — meaning that a capacity addition of 186 million tonnes is required.

The additional capacity required for handling POL products is estimated to be 91.2 million tonnes, of which that for handling coal is 77.87 million tonnes by 2013-14.

As a matter of fact, the growth of cargo at non-major ports has been higher than the major ports in the last five years. In 2000-01, the non-major ports handled 86.90 million tonnes out of the total sea-borne traffic of 368 million tonnes, while last fiscal they handled 130 million tonnes out of the total traffic of 513 million tonnes.

In other words, the CAGR of the non-major ports was 10.59 per cent, while that of major ports was 8.08 per cent in the last five years.

Amongst the major ports, New Mangalore port and Jawaharlal Nehru port recorded the highest CAGR of 17.32 per cent and 15.28 per cent respectively, while the lowest was that of Chennai port with 1.54 per cent.

One thing that will go to the credit of the major ports is that there has been a significant improvement in performance, even though a lot of ground is yet to be covered to reach the international standards. While the average turn round time has been whittled down from 4.22 days to 3.37 days, the average pre-berthing delay has been brought down from 29.28 hours to 23.44 hours in the last five years.

Improvement was more marked in the case of average output per ship berth-day, which jumped from 6,867 tonnes to 9,216 tonnes during this period. There has been an increase in container throughput, but the growth has been mostly confined to Chennai and JNPT — the two ports put together handled 71 per cent of India's container cargo in the last fiscal.

India ranked third in the growth of container traffic among the countries of the region, after China and Malaysia. With the NMDP envisaging investment worth Rs 25,308 crores involving 106 projects in the 13 major ports in the phase-1 development, it is expected that capacity addition will be brisker in the next few years than it has been in the last few years.

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