The Port of Kandla is located on the Gulf of Kutch on the northwestern coast of India. The port was opened at this natural deep-water harbor in the 1930s to serve the hinterland far beyond the state of Gujarat.
Port Commerce
Today's port was built in the 1950s after India's partitioning when the port of Karachi went to Pakistan. Major imports entering the Port of Kandla are petroleum, chemicals, and iron and steel machinery, but it also handles salt, textiles, and grain.
The Kandla Port Trust is responsible for managing and developing the port in an environmentally-friendly manner. The Port of Kandla contains storage facilities for handling chemical and liquid cargo that include six liquid cargo jetties with existing tankage capacity of over 630 tons and another 141 thousand tons under construction. The cargo jetties are linked to a sophisticated pipeline network to facilitate transport.
Container facilities at the Port of Kandla cover an area of 19.9 hectares, including a 6,480 square meter container freight station. In 2000, the facilities handled 92 thousand containers.
In 2005-2006, the Port of Kandla handled 350 thousand tons of imported cargo and over 100 thousand tons of exports. Traffic in that year included almost 300 thousand tons if liquid bulk, 90 thousand tons of dry bulk, 47 thousand tons of break bulk, and 23 thousand tons of containerized cargo.
