Visakhapatnam Port Trust (VPT) is all set to close the current financial year 2016-17 with cargo handling of 60 million tonne (MT). It’ll be a growth of 7.89 percent over 57MT registered in 2015-16 fiscal. VPT managed to improve its performance due to revival of iron ore exports.
MT Krishnababu, chairman, Visakhapatnam Port Trust, said the handling of coal could have increased the turnover further, but we couldn’t achieve. This is because of the restrictions imposed by the government.
The chairman said: “The Port has already invested Rs 2,500 crore in end to end modernization of mechanization and other infrastructure. The port will witness more growth in the near future as it’s taking up huge modernization programme at an investment of Rs 600 crore. The port will have six most modern berths having 14.5 meter draft.”
The Visakhapatnam Port Trust attributes the growth to revival of iron ore export to Japan and South Korea, which stopped last year due to expiry of long-term lease. National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) renewed the lease for 15 years with these two countries this year and VPT exported three million tonne of ore to these two countries during the current financial year.
Krishnababu further said: “The export of ore will be five million tonne in the next financial year. The Coal India Limited has propelled its growth and government has been insisting the public sector thermal power stations to use local coal. The government has also imposed minimum import price on the coal. There was also decrease in the import of coking coal as steel mills all over the country have been registering negative growth.”
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