The agreement was entered on Thursday and involves providing mobile marine unloading/loading arms at the berth in addition to upgrading fire fighting facilities and environment protection measures.

The facilities are provided to the port at a cost of Rs 5.7 crore, said Jayanta Bhuyan adding that the cost would be reimbursed to the company as per the agreement.

The upgradation of the facilities would ensure that higher volumes of liquid cargo is handled at the berth, said chairman, JNPT, MP Pinto while clarifying that IOT would not be given any priority in using the facilities.

IOT, however, would be managing the liquid cargo operations at the multi-purpose berth for three years. The agreement with the IOT also has renewable clause of three years.

The addedfacility would lead to faster turnaround of vessels carrying white and black oil with high unloading rates of 2000 and 1,500 cubic metres per hour as against the present method of handling these products through flexible hoses.

Another unique feature about the arrangement is that MP Berth still remains available for handling car carriers and other cargo as the mobile arms can be pushed and parked at the northern extreme after handling liquid cargo vessels.

According to him, the port is targetting to handle 2.5 million tonnes of liquid cargo in the current fiscal as against 0.9 million tonnes handled last year.

The total cargo likely to be handled by the port is above 10 million tonnes as against 8.9 million tonnes last year. Of this, the container traffic would be of 6.5 lakh TEUs (5.04 lakh TEUs) alone which, incidently, will be maximum container traffic handled by any port in the country.

Pinto disclosed that till November 30, the turnover of the port had gone up by 30 per cent.

As regards thefive berth marine chemical terminal coming up at a cost of around $ 500 million ( around Rs 2,000 crore), he said global tenders have been floated and pre-qualification work would be finished by April. The tendering process for the project which is coming on the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) should be over by June, he added.

Meanwhile, IOT has already started trials by using five vessels each carrying liquid cargo upto 40,000 MT and have been able to achieve discharge rate of 2000 KL per hour from the ship.

IOT has also developed its first tank terminal in Dronagiri Node of Navi Mumbai at a distance of 13 KMs from the port on a plot of 2,40,000 square metres leased from CIDCO. The terminal has a capacity of 1,95,000 KL in Phase-I which can be expanded upto 5,00,000 KL.