Angre Port in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district will achieve a capacity of 16 million tonnes by 2015, said a top official.
The port, which was thrown open for commercial operations on Tuesday, will primarily concentrate on handling clean cargoes such as sugar, foodgrains, fertiliser and liquid bulk such as molasses, said Mr M.P. Patwardhan, Managing Director of Chowgule Ports and Infrastructure Ltd (CPIL).
CPIL is a subsidiary of the Goa-based Chowgule Group, which is the promoter of the port. It is an all-weather port at Jaigad on the west coast.
The project cost for setting up the port is about Rs 1,000 crore, of which Rs 600 crore has already been invested by the promoter.
A ship-repair yard has been planned at the port.
The private sector port has been named as Angre port, after Admiral Kanhoji Angre, who led the Maratha Navy in the 17 century. The port project was awarded to the Chowgule group in March 2008 by the Maharashtra Government for a 50-year period on build-own-operate-share-transfer (BOOST) basis.
Mr Patwardhan said that a 450-metre ‘finger jetty' has been completed, which will allow loading and unloading of cargo from both sides of the jetty. The port has a draft of 10 meters, which can berth mid-size ships up to 50,000 tonnes. An exclusive jetty for liquid cargo is also being developed. In the second phase, the draft would be increased to 13 meters, which will allow larger ships to enter the port, he added.
“Since 2003, the port jetty was being used for exporting bauxite. When the bauxite demand was high in 2008, we had exported almost 3.30 lakh tonnes of the mineral using the trans-shipment procedure. The successful operation has given us the confidence in handling dry bulk cargo,” Mr Patwardhan said.
The Chairman of the Chowgule Group, Mr Vijay Chowgule, said the zone of influence of the port is up to 350 km, which covers major agriculture centres and industrial towns of western Maharashtra such as Pune, Sangli, Satara and Kolhapur, and Belgaum and Hubli in Northern Karnataka.