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Vizag Port to Become Transshipment Hub

Maritime Activity Reports, Inc.

January 21, 2015

India will develop Visakhapatnam, the largest city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, into a regional container transshipment hub. 

According to Visakhapatnam Port Trust Chairman M.T. Krishna Babu as part of transshipment hub plan, feeder services to Haldia, Kolkata, Chittagong in Bangladesh and ports in Myanmar would be developed.
 
Because of its strategic location, the city was better placed than other ports to attract cargo even from distant places, he said. Efforts were on to attract mainland vessels to Visakhapatnam Port.
 
Visakhapatnam will be a second transshipment port in the country, even as operations at the first, at Vallarpadam near Kochi, are yet to pick up pace. With sustained growth in container traffic and continued dependency on Colombo or Singapore for transshipment, the government sees an investment potential of about Rs 13,000 crore ($2.16 billion) in the project.
 
The official sources claim that Visakhapatnam had all the prerequisites to be developed like Shanghai, Rotterdam, Singapore and Jebel Ali (near Dubai). They are confident of Visakhapatnam emerging as a hub port on the East Coast making it the gateway for South East and South-East Asia.
 
At a transshipment hub, large mother vessels disaggregate cargo and send it on feeder vessels to other ports, or vice-versa. For such hubs to be viable, these should be located close to international shipping routes.
 
On a request by the Ministry of Shipping, the port submitted a detailed action plan listing the bottlenecks which needed resolving.
 
Though the International Container Transshipment Terminal (ICTT) at Vallarpadam is running at less than 40 percent of its overall capacity, its location is closer to international shipping routes, enabling it to serve traffic that is West-bound or coming from the West.
 

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