Maintaining its impressive performance, India’s premier container port, the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) registered a throughput of 5.03 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in FY 2020, crossing the five million TEU handling mark for the second year in a row.
In FY 2019, JNPT became the first Indian port to scale the heights and ended the year with 5.133 million TEUs, accounting for 43 per cent share of the containers handled at Indian ports.
In FY20, the number of containers handled however dipped demonstrating that the state-owned and India’s biggest container gateway was hit by a combination of global and local slowdown that was further aggravated by the outbreak of COVID-19.
Total traffic handled during FY 2020 in terms of tonnage was 68.45 million tonnes as against 70.71 million tons in FY 2019.
JNPT’s five container terminals- APM Terminals Mumbai handled 2 million TEUs during the year, followed by DP World Nhava Sheva (India) Gateway Terminal with 0.99 million TEUs, and PSA’s Bharat Mumbai Container Terminals with 0.82 million TEUs. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Container Terminal handled 0.77 million TEUs and the throughput of DP World Nhava Sheva International Container Terminal was 0.52 million TEUs for the year.
Sanjay Sethi, IAS, Chairman of JNPT said, “Crossing five million TEUs for a second year running is a result of our efforts and the quality of service we provide at JNPT. The team’s perseverance, especially over the last couple of months, shows our commitment towards ensuring that trade doesn’t come to a standstill. Besides this, the support of all our stakeholders also kept the momentum at JNPT going.”
The impact of the COVID-19 is currently evolving; most of the major economies starting with China have implemented extended lockdowns, leading to disruption in supply chains and severe slowdown in economic activities. However, across countries governments have implemented different strategies to maintain essential services in port terminals, customs and airports. Freight operations are carried out while keeping the presence of personnel relatively low to keep the country’s supply chains open.
JNPT has undertaken several operational performance measures to secure the Trade channel from any disruption which include no dwell time charges to be levied for import containers moved by road (CFS/DPD/Empty) discharged between March 22 till March 31, 2020; no shifting charges to be levied for import containers for which change of mode activity (from the truck to rail) is performed to facilitate the movement of CFS/DPD containers by Rail; delivery of DPD containers allowed from terminals after 48 hour till March 31, 2020.
Along with the operational excellence, JNPT has been constantly working towards facilitating ease in doing business for the Trade. Under this JNPT took a major step by facilitating a MoU for a new Inter-Terminal Rail Handling Operation (ITRHO) Agreement, between all the terminals at JN Port. The new ITRHO Agreement was signed and agreed upon by all Terminals (JNPCT, NSICT, NSIGT, GTI and BMCTPL) on July 29, 2019 which came into effect from August 1, 2019. This is helping to maximise train placement, track productivity, efficiency, cost effective handling, reduce dwell time of import ICD boxes, connecting export ICD boxes to respective terminals in time and also increase rail share at JNPT.
At JNPT, the dwell time of import containers moved by rail, has improved from 116.09 hours in 2018 to 66.16 hours (April 18 to March 19) along with the increase in the rail share to 16.22% from 14.66% in year 2018-19 (April 18 to March 19). Also, the Import dwell time of containers moved by road has reduced from 41.32 hours in year 2018 to 28.65 hours in the Apr – Dec 19 period, an improvement of 30.66%.
Besides, this year JNPT along with the private Port Terminals (DP World, APM Terminals and PSA Terminal) in coordination with CONCOR reached out to the Trade at Ludhiana where the commencement of a weekly dedicated train from Ludhiana to JNPT every Saturday was announced as per the suggestion by the Ludhiana Trade.
