LONDON: A study by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, found that Chennai Port has overcome much of its access problems that had been a key contributor to the shift of cargoes from the public gateway to nearby privately operated minor cargo terminals on India’s east coast.
Coordinated efforts at Chennai aimed at speeding truck turn times have yielded significant positive results. Average truck visit times from container freight stations to port gates have been reduced from roughly 40 hours in 2014 to nearly 15 hours earlier this year and to just over seven hours as of June 1, according to the JICA report. “We can surely achieve even better results each day, targeting zero congestion in the near future,” Port Chairman Cyril George said in a trade notice.
JICA, which has been involved with the planning and development of New Delhi’s ambitious Chennai-Bangalore Industrial Corridor project, in 2013 offered to assist the Chennai port in finding solutions to truck congestion and other bottlenecks in the harbor, which have long hurt trade in the southern India region.
During the past year, the port administration has aggressively worked with other stakeholders to deal with the port’s notorious truck congestion by introducing a string of measures that included extensive refurbishing of the port approach road, opening a “document screening center” outside the harbor to prevent trucks without complete shipping documents from entering the queue and introduction of new rail incentives to lure shippers away from trucks. Most recently, the port set up radio-frequency identification technology for gate operations.
Frustrated at the slow pace of cargo operations at Chennai, several mainline carriers, including Maersk Line, have switched to the state port’s neighboring private rivals, such as Kattupalli and Krishnapatnam, in recent months. This has had an adverse impact on Chennai’s throughput, as volume during the first two fiscal months of 2016 and 2017 through the end of May dropped 8.5 percent year-over-year to 245,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units, the newest data produced by JOC.com shows.
Although Chennai has an overall capacity of 3 million TEUs, its annual traffic has hovered around the 1.5-million-TEU mark for years. Its primary container terminals are DP World-operated Chennai Container Terminal and PSA International’s Chennai International Terminals. Authorities are hoping that gate productivity improvements brought on by automation and other measures will help arrest the port’s decline in traffic and recapture some of the volumes that have shifted to private ports.
