Maritime business summit: port operators seek e-governance

Pouring out their woes over avoidable delays due to too much paper work and cumbersome procedures for cargo handling, several top honchos of ports and logistics companies have raised a strong demand for complete e-governance to do business with ease in the fast emerging maritime sector in the east coast.

Speaking at a CEOs’ conclave as part of two-day East Coast Maritime Business Summit, which began here on Thursday, the stakeholders in the shipping business wanted rationalisation of procedures and use of technology for faster evacuation of cargo.

The summit is being organised by ‘Maritme Gateway’ in association with Visakha Container Terminal Pvt. Ltd, a BOT operator of Visakhapatnam Port.

Underlining the need to ensure faster evacuation of cargo, Visakhapatnam Port Deputy Chairman P.L. Haranadh explained how they were taking steps by introducing e-gateway and paperless transactions. He said they could handle 30 per cent more cargo on Raipur-Vizianagaram railway and the doubling of track in the route would be completed by December 2017.

Mr. Haranadh said they were in the process of expanding the two-lane Port Connectivity Road to four lanes at a cost of Rs.98 crore and developing an elevated freight corridor linking it to the connectivity road to Anakapalle and Sabbavaram at an estimated cost of Rs. 500 crore to Rs. 600 crore to avoid congestion on the highway.

Commissioner of Customs (Vijayawada) S. Khader Rehman said for past two to three years they had been taking a series of steps to simplify the procedures and hinted that they would be introducing single window clearance during the current year.

Krishnapatnam Port Director and CEO Anil Yenduluri said one had to run around 21 departments to get clearances to handle cargo in ports causing lot of time.

COO of VCTPL Sushil Mulchandani called for simplification of procedures, lessening paper work and no insistence on further checks on cargo on the basis of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Besides congestion and labour laws, use of technology was extremely important to do business with ease, said Allcargo Logistics Executive Director Adarsh Hegde.

Krishnapatnam Port ED Sriram Ravichander, Ramanathan of Adani Group and Ramprasad, editor-in-chief of Maritime Gateway, spoke.

Stakeholders in the shipping business want rationalisation of procedures and use of technology for faster evacuation of cargo