VASCO: MPT Chairman Cyril C George on Saturday flagged off the first coastal container feeder vessel MV Chowgule 7, loaded with liquor brewed by United Beverages, en route to the JNPT at Mumbai. The cargo is then expected to the transferred on international containers to be exported to various ports in Africa.
George flagged off the M V Chowgule 7 in the presence of MPT Trustee Vinod Parkot, Rakesh Unny of Integrated Sealand Services Pvt Ltd, MPT Traffic Manager Y R Belagal, MPT Manager Marketing Jerome Clement and representatives of M/s Chowgule Shipyard.
The brand new vessel has a capacity of 106 TEUs and can accommodate 20 refrigerated containers. The vessel has its own crane which can load and unload all the containers on board, and is being inducted later this month into the Goa-JNPT sector, to operate as a shuttle feeder service between these two ports.
This will be for the first time that a feeder service will be made available exclusively for the Goa trade.
Unlike previous feeder services in Goa, where Goa was one port in a service rotation of many ports, this feeder will be purely doing a Goa-JNPT-Goa shuttle service.
Speaking to Herald, MPT Chairman Cyril George stated that this initiative was part of the State government’s policy decision to promote coastal cargo.
“Earlier MPT was a mono cargo port which used to export only iron ore. Due to a ban on export of iron ore, MPT has now diversified handling of cargo and is now a multi-cargo port,” said George.
“With the export of the first cargo to Africa, pharmaceutical and other electronic
companies in Goa can also avail the facility of transporting their containers from the port,” he added.
Rakesh Unny, director of Integrated Sealand Services Pvt Ltd, told Herald that the
vessel will leave MPT once every five days and would undertake six sailings per month.
“Earlier, we would dispatch containers by road, which used to be costly and time-consuming affair. By dispatching containers via sea, a lot of time is saved and it will take roughly 30 hours to reach JNPT during monsoon and 24 hours during the normal season,” said Unny.
