BL reported that with a little more than a year to go before the scheduled commissioning of Dhamra port, the promoter of Dhamra Port Company Ltd a joint venture of TATA Steel and Larsen & Toubro is mulling signing cargo agreements with prospective users of the port.

Mr SK Mohapatra CEO of DPCL told Business that the first such agreement is to be signed shortly with TATA Steel. He said that “We will initiate negotiations in this regard with other prospective users of our port in due course, only after we have firmed up our arrangement with TATA Steel.”

Mr Mohapatra however declined to comment on the kind of cargo support he would expect from TATA Steel, except saying that initially the volume would not be large.

He observed that “With the proposed Kalinganagar and Jharkhand projects of TATA Steel yet to make much headway, we’ve to depend on the Jamshedpur plant, which already some sort of arrangements with Paradip port and Haldia dock of Kolkata port.”

Mr Mohapatra pointing out that a few months ago, several private as well as public sector steel plants inquired about the facilities to be offered by the new port. However, some of them, insisting on signing of the cargo agreements at that time, were nowhere to be seen now, presumably because of the present downturn of the economy and the consequent crisis facing the steel industry.

(Sourced from Business Line)