The Board of trustees of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) decided to award the contract for its fourth container terminal to the consortium of Singapore's PSA and the ABG group in India.
The project costing around Rs 6,700 crore will be the single largest foreign direct investment in the Indian port sector. The terminal with a designed capacity to handle 4.8 million TEUs annually on completion will more than double the JN port's capacity.
The consortium of PSA-ABG had emerged as the highest bidder agreeing to offer 50.8 percent of the revenue to the government.
But JNPT could not award the contract at the board meeÂting held in August as some of its trustees had raised doubts about the performance of ABG at Kandla Port in Gujarat where it is operating a terminal jointly with PSA. Following this, the port trust had set up a committee, headed by its Deputy Chairman to study the performance of ABG at Kandla.
The committee has preseÂnted its report to the board. The board was understood to be of the view that the performance of ABG group at Kandla Port was not of relevance to awarding the JN Port contract.
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