Rs.8,000 crore earmarked for ports expansion

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The government on Thursday said it had awarded contracts worth Rs.8,000 crore for expansion of three ports - Mumbai, Kandla and Visakhapatnam.

The projects to be developed on public-private-partnership (PPP) model will create an additional capacity of more than 79 million tonnes per annum, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said in a statement.

"The other PPP projects are also moving ahead at full speed and most of them will be awarded within the first half of this financial year, with some of the projects being awarded within the next two months," it said.

A review meeting of the port sector was conducted on the directive of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

This was a follow-up to a meeting taken three months ago in which the ministry was given instructions to speed up the implementation of PPP projects so that the constraints in port capacity would be removed, the PMO said.

One of the major bottlenecks in the port sector was securing clearances from various ministries such as home, defence and environment.

The PMO has put in place a new process to ensure speedy clearances of the projects in future.