The first trial run cargo ship from India under an agreement signed to strengthen transit facilities with Bangladesh arrived at Mongla Port on Monday.
The ship, MV Rishad Rayhan, arrived at the port from Kolkata in the morning.
The vessel was carrying 16.38 tons of iron pipes and 8.5 tons of pre-foam. The cargo is bound for Assam through the Birbirbazaar-Srimantpur border points.
Authorities are set to unload the goods from MV Rishad Rayhan in the morning on Tuesday, said Chairman of Mongla Port Authority Rear Admiral Mohammad Musa.
High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh will be present at the port during the unloading, he added.
“India's Kolkata port started the first of four trial runs towards the full implementation of the agreement,” he noted.
Pradeep Kumar Das, local manager of the vessel’s shipping agent, said the transit cargo ship is currently at Mongla port for trial runs on the Mongla-Tamabil and Mongla-Bibirbazar routes.
“Through this, the import and export of goods between Bangladesh and India have started,” he added.
The decision to conduct the trial runs was made at the meeting of the 13th India-Bangladesh Joint Group of Customs (JSC) in March.
Will transhipment be successful this time?
This is not the first time that Bangladesh and India have conducted a trial run of transhipment facilities. Another trial run was conducted in July 2020, and a cargo shipment arrived at Ashuganj port under the transhipment agreement in 2019.
However, almost no cargo has arrived under the transhipment agreement other than in the trial runs. A lack of necessary infrastructure and insufficient equipment for the weighing and handling of goods were behind the slow movement of cargo, according to government officials.
Due to the lack of infrastructure and poor road connections to Ashuganj port, Bangladesh and India in 2018 signed a standard operating procedure (SOP) on the use of Chittagong and Mongla ports for the movement of goods to destinations in India.
According to the standard operating procedure, goods reaching Chittagong and Mongla sea ports will be carried by road, rail, and water routes to Agartala (Tripura) via Akhaura, to Dawki (Meghalaya) and Tamabil and Sutarkandi (Assam) via Sheola, and to Srimantpur (Tripura) via Bibirbazar.
Although Chittagong and Mongla ports are more suitable for transhipment than Ashuganj, Indian businessmen have so far been reluctant to use transhipment facilities due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fee structure.
In 2021, a spokesperson of the Indian High Commission in Dhaka said: "To jumpstart the regular commercial transhipment services under this agreement, the fee and charges currently under negotiation between India and Bangladesh remain to be finalized. These include the administrative fee (to be collected by NBR), port charges (to be collected by ports concerned) and a proposed road fee (to be collected by the Road & Bridges Ministry). It needs to be borne in mind that this operation will move forward if it is commercially viable. And this viability can only be established if charges are reasonable and business-friendly, for the mutual benefit of businesses on both sides of the border."