A Step To Make India Aatmanirbhar For its Maritime Trade

20 January 2023

An expression of interest for the country’s first Mega container Trans-shipment port at Galathea bay in great Nicobar Island is expected to be floated by January end. 

There is no large container trans-shipment port in India and all International container cargo has to go to Columbia, Singapore and port Klang in Malaysia. With 75% of the country’s Trans-shipment cargo being handled at international ports, it makes Indian industries vulnerable to increase its cost, potential inefficiency, and congestion issues and creates long term risk for India’s trade competitiveness.

More than 16.1 million 20 foot equivalent units handled at India’s ports, Out of the nearly 75% of India’s trans-shipment containers that are handled at ports outside India, Colombo Singapore and Port Klang handle more than 85% of it. To address this, Rs. 17,000 crore has been invested in this port to help trans-shipment of cargo from the entire east coast of India as well as from Bangladesh and Myanmar is being planned.

India has an international container trans-shipment terminal at Kochi in Kerala currently but its scale is much lower than the proposed port in the Nicobar Islands. The trans-shipment port enables big ships to anchor, raise India’s share in Maritime trade, create new job opportunities, and save a lot of Forex.

In the first phase, the length of the jetty will be 1.6 kms and will have the capacity of 4.3 million TeUs containers. Later, it would be ramped up to 16 million TeUs over the years. The expression of interest will help seek feedback from global port operators, Maritime service majors and shipping linears. After this process, a detailed project report will be prepared for the project for seeking bids.