India enters dredger market

Next month Kandla Port in India will have the country’s first and Asia’s second shipbuilding and ship-repair yard for building and repairing dredgers. The Rs 450-crore venture has been set up by the Kandla-based company, Jaisu Shipping, which is the only company in India engaged in dredging in the private sector.

The company got its ISO 9001-2000 certification from the Indian Register Quality System. “This certification is a prerequisite for obtaining license for setting up the facility and we are likely to get it from the Directorate General of Shipping in a week’s time,” according to Sujay Kewalramni, Director (Technical) of the company. He said when the maritime nations in the world experienced a great shortage of dredgers and Holland had the monopoly over this business, it was China in Asia that set up the facility two months ago. “Now, it is India’s turn to do so and we are the first and only private sector company in our country to build and repair dredgers at the lowest cost in the whole world,” he said.

He said the present cost of a new dredger from The Netherlands was Rs 300 crore, while new entrant China built it at a cost of Rs 70 crore, but India?s cost would work out to Rs 45 crore to Rs 50 crore. “Dutch dredgers are built for soil strata of their country which did not prove efficient in warm climates like India. Here the Indian dredger would be built keeping in minds local conditions and would be useful in the Indian sub-continent,” he said.

He said that his company would be receiving a floating dry dock which would be arriving from Korea by the middle of January. It would be 150 metres in length with a lifting capacity of 6,000 tonnes. Initially, for the first year, Jaisu Shipping will be building dredgers for their own use and would be accepting international orders from 2009 onwards. “We are in the dredging business along with the Dredging Corporation of India and both handle the country’s dredging work on a fifty-fifty basis,” he said, adding that dredging work of most of the government-controlled major ports were with his company.