Cranes to be installed in Vizhinjam port by April

The full-fledged installation and demonstration of cranes being brought to the under-construction Vizhinjam International Seaport will be held by April ahead of the first phase opening of the port for business.

The full-fledged installation and demonstration of cranes being brought to the under-construction Vizhinjam International Seaport will be held by April ahead of the first phase opening of the port for business. The port developer, Adani Ports, has ordered a total of eight rail-mounted quay cranes and 24 cantilever rail-mounted gantry cranes for the upcoming port project at Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. (ZPMC), the world’s largest port crane maker.

Out of the 32 cranes ordered, 15 cranes including four ship-to-shore cranes have already reached here, while 17 cranes will be delivered by March. These cranes will be configured by the supplier to handle containers. Before pressing the cranes for the full-fledged operation, the equipment’s worthiness has to be ensured. The productivity of cranes is expected to be around 30 moves per hour, according to sources. Per-hour moves of cranes are very important in the shipping trade as ships have to be turned around as quickly as possible at the port. 

A commercial ship may also be brought to the port in either April or May to demonstrate the worthiness of equipment. The authorities are planning to complete the crane configuration before the monsoon. However, the full-fledged commercial operation of the port is expected to be launched by this year-end.

Meanwhile, the Adani Vizhinjam Ports Ltd (AVPL), which develops the port on the Design, Build, Finance, Operate, Transfer (DBFOT) basis, could complete only 67% of the work on the 3.1-km-long breakwater till December, while the overall progress of the port work is 72%.

In fact, the cranes for the port were ordered in 2018, but the port developer had to reschedule the delivery timeline of the cranes to meet the construction schedule following a delay in the construction of the port. The project, the contract for which was signed on August 17, 2015, was to be commissioned in 2019. After the project failed to meet the deadline, the contractor company had invoked natural calamities like two back-to-back floods and the Ockhi cyclone as force majeure — an event that is beyond the control of the parties and renders contractual performance impossible — to seek extensions in the deadline.