CONTAINER shipping continues to divert from Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JN) near Mumbai to the northern ports of Pipavav and Mundra in Gujarat state because railways cannot remove them fast enough from the docks.
JN port operations chief SN Maharana blamed the Container Corp of India Ltd (Concor), which runs container trains between ports and inland container depots for not having enough rolling stock to move the containers out, reports Live Mint Wall Street Journal.
JN port has three container loading terminals, one run by DP World, another by the government-owned port itself, and a third operated by a consortium comprising APM Terminals and Concor.
Container congestion at JN port was blamed on trains backlogged all along the route to the inland national capital of New Delhi.
Counting storage and rail freight fees, the cost of moving goods from Mumbai to Delhi was up to US$840 per container - three times as much as getting the containers to India from Singapore, reported the New York Times.
"They don't have space," said SKS Logistics chairman SK Saha, who explained that the government-owned Indian Railways is fully booked.
Economists say India must invest heavily in transportation to achieve its stated annual GDP growth goal of 10 per cent. But highway, airway and railway development falls far short of what's needed, said the Times.
Critics say the growth has been hampered by government leaders who face touchy constituents and influential special interests in a clamorous democracy contrasted to China's undemocratic free hand to order a forced march towards economic development, said the Times.
Even though Indian law allows the railways to acquire land quickly through hearings before magistrates, the railways minister has promised landowners to negotiate individually. While popular, it stands to add years to every transport project.
Another problem is that migrant workers can travel from Mumbai to their homes in Bihar 1,050 miles away for INR500 (US$11). To subsidise this, freight is stung with the highest tariffs in the world, said the New York Times.
India charges four times what American companies charge for rail freight and twice as much as in China.
Four years ago, the government began allowing private companies to operate container trains. One of the new carriers is IndiaLinx, which buys rail cars and leases tracks, locomotives and workers from the Indian Railways.
IndiaLinx CEO Amitabha Chaudhuri said his company would carry about 95,000 containers this year, up from 55,000 last year.
The company, which is owned by Singapore's APL Logistics, has seen strong demand for refrigerated containers, which are in short supply in India.
Source : HKSG, 18.06.10.
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