Jawaharlal Nehru Port Aims High
India’s largest container port, the Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNPT), said it aims to grow as one of the top 10 global container ports in the next five years.
After announcing his 'Make in India' vision plan, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first port of call was JNPT, the biggest port for handling container traffic in the country.
The foundation stone for the first leg of the $800 million multi-product Special Economic Zone SEZ project was laid on August 16. The project will develop free trade warehousing zones for engineering goods sector, textile and other sectors.
The JNPT SEZ will come up over 277 hectares of land near the port as a self-sustainable integrated development project with a potential to generate around 150,000 jobs.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has recently approved the development of an additional liquid bulk terminal at JNPT at an estimated cost of around $416 million.The project would enhance the liquid bulk cargo handling capacity of JNPT from the existing 5.5 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) to 20.5 MTPA by 2017-18 when Phase-I is expected to be commissioned.
The throughput in all its three terminals, container traffic at Jawaharlal JNPT, shot up nearly 8% to a record 4.45 million TEUs in calendar year 2014. The volume handled in 2013 was 4.12 million TEUs.
APM Terminals Mumbai handled 1.985 million TEUs in 2014, up from 1.899 million TEUs the previous year, while the Port Trust-run Jawaharlal Nehru Port Container Terminal continued to impress by handling 1.31 million TEUs.
The Port handled 64.42 million tonnes of total cargo during the year as against 62.50 million tonnes in the previous year. The growth in total traffic during 2014 was 3.06 per cent over the previous year. Containerised cargo handled was 57.66 million tonnes (89.51 per cent), liquid cargo 6.05 million tonnes (9.40 per cent) and the remaining 0.70 million tonnes (1.09 per cent) comprised miscellaneous types of dry/break-bulk cargo.
N. N. Kumar, Chairman of JNPT, thanked the stakeholders and the labour for the success of the Port and called on them to strive to do even better next year. He said that the Port would be entering a new era of growth, especially given the government’s focus on Port-led development and the Sagarmala project, which would involve interplay between the port and manufacturing zones along the coast.
