Dhaka: Bangladesh has cleared the use of Chattogram and Mongla ports by India for transit and trans-shipment of cargo, a move expected to significantly cut the time and cost needed to transport goods to the country’s northeastern states.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) of Bangladesh issued a "permanent transit order" stating that the trans-shipment of goods will be carried out in accordance with standard operating procedures that the two nations concluded under a 2018 agreement.
In recent years, India and Bangladesh have taken a number of actions to improve connectivity, including reopening several cross-border railway links that had been shut down since the 1965 war with Pakistan, connecting riverine waterway systems, and using Bangladeshi ports for trans-shipment of goods to India's strategically important northeastern region.
The two sides signed the “Agreement on the use of Chattogram and Mongla Ports for movement of goods to and from India” in October 2018 and finalised the standard operating procedures for operationalising the pact a year later. But the trans-shipment of goods had not started as Bangladesh had to finalise certain customs procedures and put in place necessary logistics, people familiar with the matter said.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused a setback for the initiative. However, the Covid-19 crisis also demonstrated the value of cross-border connection, as Bangladesh was supplied with necessities by the Indian side through cross-border train services.
Over the past year, the two sides conducted comprehensive trial runs for trans-shipment of cargo to the northeastern states using Chattogram and Mongla ports. The first trial trans-shipment of goods was done in July 2020, when a shipment of iron rods and pulses was transported from Haldia port near Kolkata to Chattogram port in southeastern Bangladesh and then shipped over land to Tripura.