Most of the ships at the country's premier Chittagong port have to spend 24 to 99 hours whereas in Singapore and Malaysian ports, ships stay only for around 12 hours, shipping sources said.

A World Bank report on strategic issues in ports pointed out that the turn around time for feeder vessels in Chittagong is 6-10 days, which is two days in Bangkok and one day in Singapore. It leads to inordinately high cost in the Bangladesh port that moves a container for $600 while a port in a neighbouring country can do it for $150-300, the report said.

This discrepancy taxes Bangladesh's economy and passes the cost of inefficiency onto consumers, the report noted.

In ports such as Singapore and Malaysia, booking of cargo ceases at least 12 hours before its arrival but at Chittagong Port booking starts only after arrival of a ship.

The booking continues for at least 24 hours. But the shipping agents can prolong the time with the permission of the traffic department.

According to World Bank report all three major ports in Bangladesh suffer from overstaffing, labour strikes, cumbersome customs procedures, outdated and inefficient work rules and outdated inflexible management practices.

Joscow View, a container carrier ship that anchored at the Chittagong Container Terminal (CCT) on December 25, left on 29 staying at the terminal for 99 hours.

Of this time, the ship was under operation for only 15.9 hours. The terminal took 32 hours to start discharging cargoes and the rest 50.4 hours was wasted for delay (break) in the work of loading and unloading cargoes.

During the 15-hour operation, the ship discharged 433 TEUs (twenty equivalent unit) containers and loaded 572 TEUs.

Another ship Kota Rukan spent a total of 96 hours at the CCT after anchoring at the terminal on December 18. The ship also spent 29 hours idle time at the terminal before starting operation. The loading and unloading was postponed for 53 hours. Kota Rukan left the terminal on December 22 after remaining for 13.4 hours under operation handling a total of 823 TEUs.

This is a common picture of the country's premier Chittagong port as the ship movement report of the port's traffic department shows that most of the ships stay between 24 to 99 hours at the terminal.

Monitoring the movement of 13 ships anchored at the port between December 15 last year and January 2 this year it was found that each ship spent 20 to 75 hours idle time at the terminal before starting cargo handling. Ships also waste 30 to 66 hours due to breaks in handling containers.

Although the political situation in the country was relatively less volatile at that time, the ships badly suffered due to delay in discharging goods. According to an estimate of the Chittagong Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI), the ship owners lost as much as $ 286 million in the last financial year due to delay in discharging export and import goods at the premier port.

"If the turn around time could be reduced, the ship owners would have been able to save that amount of money," said Amirul Haque, chairman of port and ship standing committees of CCCI and FBCCI.

The country lost around 200 times of the amount as the slow functioning of the port shattered the total economy, he said.

The delay of ships at Chittagong Port costs millions of dollar every day to the garment sector, BGMEA President Fazlul Hoque said, adding that sometimes the garment owners lose export order or they have to go for air shipment that decreases the profit margin.

The ship operators said if a vessel is delayed for one day it suffers a financial loss of around $ 12,000. The average rate of charter for a medium ship is around $10,000 per day and another 2,000 dollars are for additional berthing fees and operating cost, they pointed out.

The people are the ultimate loss bearers as the ship owners add the cost to the freight of the cargo.

Amirul Haque said, port operators, stevedores and traffic department are mainly responsible for delay in handling goods and making the port most expensive in the region. The stevedores compel the traffic department to hire labour only from a pull of 1,435 workers and fix the number of workers in a gang, he added.

In the absence of any fixed cut off time for ships, the traffic department 'whimsically' fixes the time for each ship and a ship can stay longer for loading additional cargo.

The delay at the terminal occurs also due to inefficiency of the port operators and non-availability of handling equipment at the yards.

The CPA operators of rubber tyre gantry cranes (RTG), trailers and truck usually arrive late to join their duties at the start of every shift and after having gone for meal breaks. They also stop work quite before end of the shift.

Non-alignment of trailers under QGCs spreader is also a cause of the delay, the source said, adding that discharging and stacking of import containers at the RTG blocks also take much time.

Due to delay in back up services, only 21 per cent of the capacity of four sophisticated gantry cranes is being utilised. Private operators were given the charge to operate the gantry cranes installed last year to accelerate cargo handling at the port.

The CCT is enough to handle the entire volume of cargo bound for the Chittagong Port if its full capacity is utilised, observed the private operators.

They prepared a performance report of the ships and submitted to the port authority for improving the situation.

Professional management of the port would save a lot of money which can be used for expansion of the port facilities and setting up new ports, said a member of Chittagong chamber.

Private operators said the Chittagong Port Authority documentation staff deployed for assisting operation of quay gantry cranes waste much time simply tallying the container number, checking the seal and noting the seal number.

Insufficient quantity of trailers is also a big cause of delay, especially when import containers are supposed to go somewhere other than CCT terminal yards. Due to long distance, traffic jam often occurs inside the port, and access roads.

The cut off time for the export cargo is not maintained and it causes much delay as the export containers come late or usually keep on coming one by one with an interval of 20-30 minutes. The waiting time for export container is gradually increasing, sources said.

The delay in handling cargo at the premier port often causes huge congestions of both the containers and ships. The congestions of containers went beyond control recently as over 20,000 TEUs containers remained stockpiled at the port yard.

On the other hand, around two dozen ships always remain in the waiting row at the outer anchorage of the port for getting permission to berth. According to the World Bank report, port inefficiencies cost the country around $1.1 billion a year.

If the ports continue to choke the economy's international trading links, no amount of macroeconomic, trade or industrial policies will produce the massive export push needed to accelerate economic growth, the WB report observed.