With a little more than a year to go before the scheduled commissioning of Dhamra port, the promoter, Dhamra Port Company Ltd (DPCL), a joint venture of Tata Steel and Larsen & Toubro, is mulling signing cargo agreements with prospective users of the port. The first such agreement is to be signed shortly with Tata Steel, Mr S.K. Mohapatra, CEO of DPCL, told Business Line here on Friday.
“We will initiate negotiations in this regard with other prospective users of our port in due course, only after we’ve firmed up our arrangement with Tata Steel,” Mr Mohapatra said, pointing out that a few months ago, several private as well as public sector steel plants inquired about the facilities to be offered by the new port.
However, some of them, insisting on signing of the cargo agreements at that time, were nowhere to be seen now, presumably because of the present downturn of the economy and the consequent crisis facing the steel industry, he said.
Mr Mohapatra, however, declined to comment on the kind of cargo support he would expect from Tata Steel, except saying that initially the volume would not be large.
“With the proposed Kalinganagar and Jharkhand projects of Tata Steel yet to make much headway, we’ve to depend on the Jamshedpur plant, which already some sort of arrangements with Paradip port and Haldia dock of Kolkata port,” he observed.
At present, Tata Steel imports annually about 0.7 million tonnes (mt) of coking coal through Haldia and about 1 mt through Paradip.
Mr Mohapatra allayed the fear that Haldia and Paradip would stand to lose substantially with the commissioning of Dhamra port.
“Tata Steel’s Hooghly Metcoke at Haldia will continue to import coking coal through the dock; also, it will be too much to presume that the steel plants proposed to be set up near Paradip will opt for Dhamra port in preference to Paradip port,” he observed.
In the long run, however, as the CEO of DPCL felt, it would make sense for the users of Kolkata port to explore the possibility of using Dhamra port as the transshipment point for handling dry bulk cargoes in view of the problems thrown up by the limited navigability of the Hooghly river.
For a large number of industries in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and parts of Orissa, Dhamra port would be the obvious choice because of its proximity to deep sea as well as hinterland (both as the source of raw materials and destinations of imports).
To start with, Dhamra port will have two berths totalling 25 mt of capacity a year – one for handling coking coal imports and the other for iron ore exports. “The capacity of our coking coal berth will almost be equal to the present level of total coking coal imports through all east coast ports,” he added.
Source: The Hindu Business Line
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