SCI to buy 110 vessels for Rs 27,668 cr

Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) plans to acquire 110 vessels of 5.21 million gross tonnage (GT) at an estimated cost of Rs 27,668 crore in next 10 years, Parliament was informed today.

Among these vessels, the Shipping Corporation is likely to place orders for 26 vessels by 2011-12, Shipping Minister G K Vasan said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

He added that the acquisition of the vessels would take SCI's total tonnage to about 7.21 million GT by 2020.

Gross tonnage is a unitless index related to a ship's overall internal volume and is calculated based on the moulded volume of all enclosed spaces of the ship.

The Shipping Minister further said that SCI has placed orders for 36 vessels so far against the target of acquiring 62 vessels in 11th Five Year Plan, which includes acquisition of one resale vessel.

Of these, five vessels have been delivered while others are being built in different Indian, Chinese and South Korean shipyards, he said.

The Shipping Corporation currently has a fleet of 78 vessels of different types, having a total 3.19 million GT and total carrying capacity of 5.61 million DWT (dead weight tonnage).

During the first nine months of the ongoing fiscal, the Navratna company carried a total cargo of 23.08 million tonne plus 1.27 lakh TEUs, Vasan said.

Dead weight tonnage (DWT) is a measure of how much weight a ship is carrying or can safely carry, while the twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) is an inexact unit of cargo capacity, used to describe the capacity of container ships and container terminals.