Both seaports remain underdeveloped
While many countries do not have the benefit of even one seaport, we have two. But the irony is that, while Chittagong port is saturated with heavy congestion, the Mongla port is underutilised, because of lack of infrastructure and shallow draft.
If one looks at the five year data on cargo handling at Mongla port, we find that the number of total containers cleared presently has actually gone down steadily from 2013 and a mere 26,952 twenty feet containers (TEUs) were handled in fiscal 2016-17 at a port that has the capacity to handle 70,000 TEUs. This is most disheartening because the Chittagong port has been grappling with congestion where container ships have had to wait at outer anchorage for 6 to 12 days and bulk carriers around 20 or more to get berth.
One would have thought that policymakers would have recognised the dire situation by now and taken steps to upgrade Mongla port to take some of the pressure off Chittagong, but that has not happened.
With the bulk of our imports and exports going through Chittagong port, we are once again constrained to highlight its lack of infrastructure. Because of inordinate delays that have now pushed back loading and unloading of containers at the port city, many shippers have had to increase their charges up to USD 400 per TEU to offset the cost of demurrage for goods that are offloaded due to delays. Policymakers have not prioritised the upgrading of key port facilities like the number of jetties, which have remained stagnant since 2007, and we see the building of a container terminal now shifted to 2019. The lack of action on the principal port Chittagong is pushing up cost of doing business which is hardly helpful to our foreign trade.
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