The Hindu Business Line : Developing second box terminal at Chennai port — Hutchison awaits Central nod to participate in bidding

THE Centre is yet to give its security clearance to the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings that has partnered Larsen & Toubro to bid for developing and operating the second container terminal at the Chennai port.

However, the other two consortium bidders — Port of Singapore Authority/Sical and Emirates Trading Agency/Gammon India — have got the clearances to bid for the Rs 492-crore project, Mr K. Suresh, Chairman, Chennai Port Trust, told Business Line.

Hutchison's bid for the Mumbai container terminal is also pending, and it is trying to impress the authorities not to exclude it from bidding in Chennai, he said.

The clearance is getting delayed as Indian security agencies had raised the issue of a possible threat to country's infrastructure from Chinese connections, said an industry source.

Hutchison Port Holdings is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, which is one of the world's leading port investors, developers and operators. It operates 242 berths in 41 ports and handled 47.8 million TEUs (twenty foot equivalent unit) in 2004, says information available in its Web site.

According to Mr Suresh, the port trust will go ahead with the technical evaluation of the bids, and plans to open the financial bids in January 2006, he said.

The port trust will invest Rs 100 crore in the project for dredging, modernising the wharf and providing connections to the terminal, which is coming up in East Quay. The quay was not even yielding 20 per cent of revenue for the port trust, he said.

The second terminal would provide the trade an alternative to the existing private terminal operated by the Chennai Container Terminal (CCT), which is likely to touch one million TEUs in the next couple of years. In the last financial year the CCT handled 6.15 lakh TEUs.