About 5,000 containers a day are stuck at Mundra, India’s largest container port, after yard operators outside the port’s boundary stopped work in protest against a rule that took away their business. Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone froze the yard codes of off-dock facilities from 1 September, meaning shipping lines can no longer send empty boxes to yards beyond the Mundra SEZ.
The Mundra Empty Container Yards and Allied Services Provider Association, which represents those operators, began the shutdown days earlier. The daily figure of 5,000 boxes comes from the Mundra Customs Brokers’ Association, as reported by Maritime Gateway.
What an empty-container yard actually does
Empty boxes are the unglamorous half of container shipping. An importer’s cargo arrives at Mundra, gets trucked inland, is unpacked, and the box then has to go somewhere until a shipping line needs it again. Equally, an exporter in Morbi or Surat who wants to pack goods at the factory has to first collect an empty container from a yard. Off-dock yards near Mundra have handled that storage and handing-out for years, on codes issued by the port that let lines nominate boxes to them.
Freezing those codes moves the work inside the SEZ. In a trade advisory quoted in local reports, APSEZ said the change was meant to tighten security, cut road congestion around the port and shorten truck turnaround times. Those are real problems on the Mundra approach roads. They are also, from the perspective of an operator whose yard sits three kilometres outside the line, indistinguishable from being shut down.
What has stopped and what has not
Hapag-Lloyd told customers that the affected yards have suspended empty-container allotments for factory stuffing and empty-container gate-ins, Container News reported. Container freight station operations at the port continue as normal, so cargo that gets packed at a CFS rather than at the factory is largely unaffected.
That split matters for who feels the pain. Large exporters who stuff at a CFS can work around this. The ones caught out are the factory-stuffing shippers, and in Gujarat that describes a great deal of the export base: ceramics from Morbi, man-made fabric from Surat, engineering goods from Rajkot, chemicals and pharmaceuticals from the Ahmedabad and Vadodara belt. Those consignments are packed at the plant precisely because handling tiles or fabric twice damages them and costs more.
The bill Gujarat exporters are already paying
The costs of a jam like this are not evenly spread and they are not small. Trucks that arrived to collect empties sit loaded or empty on the road, earning nothing while detention runs. Consignments that miss a vessel cut-off get rolled to the next sailing, which for a Europe or United States service can mean a week. Where a letter of credit or a buyer’s delivery window is tied to a shipment date, a week is the difference between a paid invoice and a renegotiated one. The Federation of Freight Forwarders’ Associations in India and MCBA have both taken the matter up, and MCBA secretary Manoj Kotak said the trade should not be left carrying the extra cost of the disruption.
The timing is the sharpest part. Early September is when exporters shipping to Europe and North America book for the year-end retail season, and it runs straight into the Diwali production slowdown. A fortnight lost now is not recovered in November.
What to watch
Three things will decide how this ends. Whether APSEZ offers the off-dock operators a route back, through relocation inside the SEZ or a phased transition rather than a hard cut-off. Whether shipping lines such as MSC and Ocean Network Express, which have been issuing their own advisories, begin diverting Gujarat-origin boxes to Pipavav, Hazira or Nhava Sheva, because a diversion that lasts becomes a habit. And whether the state government or the Directorate General of Shipping steps in, given that a private port operator’s yard policy is now determining whether a Morbi tile factory can ship this week.
Sources: Maritime Gateway, Container News, WorldCargo News, DeshGujarat
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.