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One of the major reason cited by planners for JNP congestion is nature of cargo handled. Typically container ships act as a mother vessel and offload the cargo at the destination port from where container is carried on small feeder vessel to the end destination port. The port where container is offloaded then becomes the hub and the end destination port is called spoke, thus forming the part of hub and spoke system and affectively making the hub port as transhipment hub.
JNP do not enjoy that service, possibility of which cannot be ruled out in future.
As the rapid growth of containerisation around the world has bought a significant redefinition to the container shipping industry. To achieve the economics of size, a marked increase in the size of vessels can be seen world over. Deployment of larger vessel in turns has seen an emergence of highly state-of -art terminals known as Hub Ports, where India's Vallarpadam port can be an answer, which is expected to start operation from next year.
Once, port congestion was a fact of life and shipping people were wearily resigned to long waits for berths and delays for every conceivable reason. People kept huge stocks of goods and raw materials to guard against delay. But shipping today is far more of a precision industry and is thus more vulnerable to delays from port congestion. A containership, which fails to get alongside because the berth is occupied, will miss the special train waiting for its boxes, and the goods, which were anticipated "just in time", will be delayed. This is why there is pressure on ports to invest more and have more reserve capacity to keep the ships moving and the cargo arriving on time. Congestion is simply too expensive to tolerate today.
Concluded.
* Contributed by -
Amit Gupta,
Did Dual MBA from IMI, Belgium and IIPM, New Delhi (Specialisation in Marketing & Finance) in February 2005,
Currently working in i-Maritime Consultancy Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai.
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