Indian port opens, court delays some operations

Indian port opens, court delays some operations    An Indian court has delayed the transfer of domestic container operations into a major new transshipment port in South India due to dockworker concerns over lost jobs.
   The massive new container terminal opened last week in the Port of Cochin. Operated by DP World, it is designed to spur container lines into serving India direct with large vessels that can't call at the country's busiest ports.
   A sizable percentage of India's container traffic is transshipped at the Port of Colombo, but the Cochin terminal, called the International Container Transshipment Terminal at Vallarpadam, was envisioned as a way to redirect container flows into India. But a key part of the plan includes disseminating cargo at ICTT to other ports through coastal shipping networks in India.
   ICTT was meant to replace an aging and small container terminal in the Port of Cochin, which mostly handled import/export cargo from the state of Kerala and from southern India's booming textile manufacturing sector.
   The new facility, which has a capacity of 1 million TEUs in the first phase that went operational this week (ramping up to 4 million TEUs depending on demand), will be reliant on transshipment. The terminal can handle 10,000-TEU ships, far larger than all but one port in the country can handle. Even India's busiest container gateway, the Jawaharlal Nehru-Nhava Sheva port complex, can't handle vessels larger than about 3,000 TEUs due to draft restrictions.
   International Freighting Weekly reported Monday that an Indian high court has acceded to dockworkers protests and halted domestic operations for three months in order to look at whether the transfer of operations from the old terminal will affect employment. Import and export operations are not affected, the report said.