CPA mulls over retaining 30 foreigners to operate cranes

Chittagong: The Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) in a board meeting on Monday afternoon decided to appoint 30 operators from abroad to operate four sophisticated rail-mounted gantry cranes procured at a cost of Tk 150 crore from Japan.

Port sources said the meeting presided over by the CPA Chairman, AMM Shahadat Hossain, took the decision against the backdrop of the failure of the local operators to utilise the maximum capacity of the cranes.

Meeting sources added that the decision of the CPA would be placed before the Central Procurement Unit of the government to set the process of appointing the foreign operators.

The CPA commissioned four rail-mounted gantry cranes, having capacity to handle 35 TEUs of container per hour each, on January 30 in 2005 when the authority was handling a total of 30 TEUs of containers per hour.

The CPA expected that the four gantry cranes would handle at least 100 TEUs containers per hour and it would reduce the standing period of the ships in the port significantly.

But after the commissioning of the gantry cranes, the container handling capacity of the port had not increased, rather it had reduced in some cases, port sources said.

In this situation, the authority in January formed a five-member committee, headed by CPA member (operations), Kamrul Hassan, to investigate the slow pace of container handling with the sophisticated gantry cranes.

The committee submitted a report after inquiring one month that the operators need training and subsequently the authority sent 50 operators to Japan for training by turn to make them expert in operating the high capacity gantry canes.