Posted on April 28, 2016
The ports of Kolkata and Haldia may not survive unless the Centre reconsiders its decision to cut dredging subsidy, M T Krishna Babu, chairman, Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT) said on Wednesday. KoPT spent nearly Rs 380 crore on dredging in 2015-16. Only 85% of this will be subsidised by the ministry of shipping. The Centre plans to make further cuts. The Centre also owes KoPT Rs 578 crore as backlog in dredging subsidies for several years.
“In 2015-16, KoPT handled 50.195 million tonnes of traffic. This was an increase of 8.43% from 2014-15. The average increase by Indian major ports was 4.31%. Our operating income for the year was Rs 1,577.21 crore and the operating surplus was Rs 603.65 crore as compared to Rs 469.49 crore in 2014-15,” Babu said.
Despite a healthy operating surplus, KoPT registered a net loss of Rs 148 crore in 2015-16. In 2014-15, the net loss was Rs 68 crore. According to the chairman, this was due to the huge pension liability of KoPT. In 2015-16, Rs 333 crore was diverted from the operating surplus to the pension fund. The port facility intends to divert a further Rs 30 crore to this corpus. Funds were also spent on dredging and KoPT received Rs 75 crore less dredging subsidy in 2015-16 due to the Centre’s new policy. All these factors led to the port registering a net loss.
“KoPT has 30,000 pensioners and Rs 5,800 crore is required for a pension fund should we decide to engage an insurance firm. We have only succeeded in building a corpus of Rs 1,300 crore so far. In order to avoid trouble in the future and ensure that our pensioners receive their dues, we prefer to divert funds to the corpus rather than register a net profit and pay income tax. Our biggest problem is dredging subsidy though. We hope to bring down dredging costs to about Rs 200 crore, now that ships have started moving through the Eden Channel instead of Auckland. Even then, the Centre should have a formula to decide how much subsidy is to be cut,” Babu added.
KoPT hopes to achieve a target of 53 million tonnes in 2016-17. Several measures have been planned for this. Talks are already on with Bangladesh for more movement of cargo from the ports of Kolkata and Haldia. For the first time, a Bangladeshi vessel will arrive in India for containers on Friday. Officials said that this cargo movement to Bangladesh will be of 40-50,000 tonnes annually in the first stage. Efforts are also on to bring down port charges after which SAIL is likely to 2.2 million tonnes of cargo through Haldia. KoPT is also trying to tap into the movement of cars, trucks and equipment from southern India to the eastern states by ship. A company has already approached port authorities with a proposal to move 500 vehicles per month by ship to Kolkata.
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