Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), India’s premier container port, registered a throughput of 283,802TEU in April, which translates to 80% of the imports handled in April 2019.
With factories in the hinterland opening up due to the revised lockdown norms issued by the Government of India, exports are picking up, says JNPT, which handled a total of 167 vessels in April 2020 with an improved overall turnaround time from 39hrs to 33hrs.
JNPT has taken various measures to limit the impact of the outbreak while also protecting the trade channel from any disruption.
Some of the proactive measures taken by JNPT include extended relief to the trade in order to support Port users and end-users like – no dwell time charges will be levied for all import/export containers moved by road and rail (CFS -container freight station-/DPD -direct port delivery-/Empty/ICD -inland container depot), no shifting charges will be levied for change of mode (i.e. truck to rail or rail to truck) and no shifting charges will be levied for DPD containers moved by rail after 48 hours to ICD Mulund or ICD Tarapur from 13 April as they have been declared as ‘extended port gates’ of JN Port.
In the wake of this crisis Port has also prepared an action plan for avoiding congestion and created sufficient storage capacities inside and outside the Port. Extended Port gate facility has been made available for DPD containers at Mulund and Boisar. Additional storage capacity has also been created at CWC, Dronagiri node where cargo is being moved through en-block movement.
In the month of April JNPT handled 499 container trains, making it the highest number of container trains handled in a particular month. This also resulted in increasing the rail coefficient during the month to 22.39 % against the previous FY monthly average of 16.04%.
