Chabahar port inaugurated: Pakistan’s envy?

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani inaugurated a long-awaited $1 billion project to expand its southeastern Chabahar port which Tehran hopes would help the country become a key transit route to Afghanistan and Central Asia, competing with Gwadar port.

President Rouhani inaugurated the expansion on December 3, carried out with an investment of $1 billion, including $235 million from India. The project has more than tripled the port’s capacity to 8.5 million tonnes a year.

India has committed $500m to the Gulf of Oman port, which is Iran’s closest to the Indian Ocean and would allow it to bypass Pakistan. In October, India sent its first consignment of wheat to Afghanistan through Chabahar, about 140km from Gwadar.

While India and Iran are signatories to the port development project, a second agreement on connectivity was also signed by India, Iran and Afghanistan. This pact allows Afghanistan to use Chahbahar port to ship its goods to markets like India, thereby reducing its dependence on Pakistan and its Karachi port. Both the port development pact and the connectivity agreement were signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Tehran in May last year.

The project was executed by a Revolutionary Guard-affiliated company, Khatam al Anbia, the largest Iranian contractor of government construction projects. It involved several subcontractors, including a state-run Indian company.

The expansion includes five new piers, two of them for containers allowing cargo vessels with up to 100,000-tonne captaincy to dock.

President Rouhani said Iran also planned to link the port to the country’s railroad network to facilitate transit of goods to neighbouring landlocked Central Asian countries, as well as open a route to eastern and northern Europe through Russia.

The project was conceived in 2003. The port can accommodate giant ships up to a dry weight of 120,000 tonnes, with further stages of development due to expand the port over the next 14 years.

Mr Rouhani underlined the importance of Chabahar as Iran’s only port outside the Gulf, and therefore outside an area that is often the locus of tensions with the US navy and Iran’s regional rivals.

 India can now bypass Pakistan in transporting goods to Afghanistan. For years, New Delhi has been trying to persuade Pakistan to allow it to transport goods to Afghanistan using the land route—i.e, through its soil into the landlocked country. India got Afghanistan included in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2007 in a bid to ensure connectivity among all countries in South Asia and in the grouping was established but Pakistan did not play ball.