State-owned Container Corporation of India Ltd (Concor) ran a service on Wednesday, carrying 80 containers of wheat from the International Container Transhipment Terminal (ICTT) at Vallarpadam in Cochin Port Trust to its inland container depot at Irugur in Coimbatore.

This is yet another example of cooperation among stakeholders to move containers out of port terminals due to issues with road movements arising from the three-week lockdown imposed by the government to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Many import containers were stuck at ICTT as trucks stopped plying due to shortage of drivers.

“Because of the lockdown, road movements have come down to a large extent from ICTT,” said a Concor official involved in the exercise. “Therefore, we had to find a way to keep goods moving and so joined hands with ICTT and a few customers to run the service,” he said.

“We have been working on running a service linking ICTT with Irugur for a few months and the current situation actually catalysed the rake movement,” he added. Concor, he said, plans to make it into a tri-weekly service depending on the demand.

Rail service

In January, Concor started a rail service linking India’s only container transhipment terminal run by Dubai government-owned D P World Pvt Ltd with its ICD in Bengaluru with a longer frequency, which it plans to convert into a weekly service by the second quarter of FY21.

In FY20, ICTT handled more than 620,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), 4.28 per cent more than the 595,000 TEUs it handled in FY19, despite a challenging year marked by global and local economic slowdown and trade disruptions due to the outbreak of coronavirus.

A TEU is the standard size of a container and a common measure of capacity in the container business.

Concor has been plying extra services to move import containers out of port terminals to various inland container depots (ICDs) to reduce congestion due to container pile-up at ports in the face of inadequate road transportation, trade sources said.

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