KOCHI: The Cochin Port Joint Trade Unions Forum has demanded that the Cochin Port Authority and the Ministry of Ports make public the details and rationale behind the reported two-year extension granted to the operator of the International Container Transshipment Terminal (ICTT) at Vallarpadam.
The unions said the extension, reportedly based on the recommendations of a conciliation and settlement committee headed by former ports secretary Gopalkrishna, warranted public scrutiny in view of the terminal’s performance, prolonged contractual disputes and financial burdens borne by the Authority.
The ICTT, which is run by India Gateway Terminal Pvt Ltd (DP World), was commissioned in February 2011 with the objective of turning Cochin into a major international transshipment hub. Its ultimate projected capacity was 2.5 million TEUs annually, while Phase I had a capacity of 1.2 million TEUs.
However, the forum questioned whether the terminal had delivered on the expectations behind the project and its contractual arrangements. The operator handled 0.32 million TEUs at the Rajiv Gandhi Container Terminal before shifting to Vallarpadam in 2011. In 2025-26, after 15 years of operations at Vallarpadam, it handled 0.77 million TEUs, the unions claimed.
“Closing a long-pending dispute should not become the opening of other sequences,” the forum said in its release, adding that public assets cannot be subjected to perpetual extensions.
It demanded disclosure of the terminal’s year-wise throughput against the contractual business plan, capacity utilisation, revenue earned by the port through revenue-sharing arrangements, concessions extended to the operator and the status of pending claims, counterclaims, and litigation.
