Article - 96 Week 21 WHY ICD BOXES THROUGH NHAVA SHEVA?

Article - 96  Week 21

WHY ICD BOXES THROUGH NHAVA SHEVA?

The state of affairs of handing containers in Nhava Sheva has become a nightmare for the shipping lines and shippers. Monsoon is knocking on the doors. History would repeat. ICD boxes would be piling up inside the terminals. Pendency would be driving big holes in to the pockets of the suffering shipping lines. The shippers and consignees in the hinterland ICDs would be cussing their guts out for their cargo. The terminals would be relishing & devouring the punitive storage charges from the users, while pretending and wallowing for lack of working space and various other bottlenecks. 

Under such situations, it defeats rationale to use Nhava Sheva as a gate port for the northern ICDs, when the deep ports of Pipava & Mundra stay underutilized. However, we understand that it is difficult to fight the old habits of shippers, and the cost & frequency issues of shipping lines. Indian Railways is the only organization that can right this wrong. If they increase the freight for the containers from Nhava Sheva, while subsidising the rail freight from Mundra & Pipava, the impending mess could be avoided. JNP & the terminals would not like to participate in the drill because they would lose a whole lot of easy juice. The shipping lines are far too many to join hands and enforce this boycott on JNP for the ICD boxes. They would not be in agreement to increase their usage charges ex-Nhava Sheva to discourage shippers. On the other hand, Indian Railways is the monopoly carrier to all ICDs. Such a shift in traffic would not affect its revenue. Rather it would reduce stress on this busy corridor highly populated with passenger carriage and give elbow room to develop pure freight corridors. 

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Brgds

Capt Rath