Nhava Sheva (INNSA): five terminals, five storage tariffs

This page is about India, and about one Indian port: Nhava Sheva, UN/LOCODE INNSA, the container port on the eastern side of Mumbai harbour that handles more boxes than any other in the country. It exists because the port publishes something most ports do not: the storage tariff every one of its terminals charges. That published set turns out to contain a fact worth knowing before you plan a clearance.

There is no such thing as the Nhava Sheva free period

Five companies run container terminals inside the port, and each files its own Scale of Rates with the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority. Those documents are public. Read side by side, they do not agree with each other about how long a box may sit before storage starts.

Three of the five bill in dollars and two in rupees. Two allow three free days and three allow two. The cheapest first charged day on a 40ft box is US$8.77 at GTI and the dearest is US$18.66 at NSICT, which is more than twice as much for the same day of the same delay.

And the two extremes on that free-day column belong to the same operator. DP World runs both NSICT and NSIGT, a few berths apart, and its two tariffs give an import container a different allowance in a different currency. The number is a property of the terminal, not of the company, not of the port and certainly not of the country.

You do not pick the terminal

That is what makes the table operationally awkward rather than merely interesting. Which terminal works your vessel follows from the carrier’s berthing arrangement and its service string. The importer finds out which one it was afterwards, from the paperwork.

So a desk that holds one figure for “free days at Nhava Sheva” is holding a number that is right at some terminals and a day out at the others, with no way to know in advance which. On a two-day allowance, a day is half of it. The figure has to be attached to the shipment once the terminal is known, and the last free day recomputed then.

The day count starts before anyone tells you

Every one of the five reckons storage from the day following the day of landing. Not from customs clearance, not from the arrival notice, not from the day the delivery order is settled. The meter is running while the desk is still waiting to hear the vessel has worked.

The holiday treatment is where the tariffs stop agreeing again, and it is written in four different ways at one port:

• NSICT: the free dwell time allowed “shall be exclusive of customs notified holidays and port non-working days”.
• NSIGT and BMCT: the storage period “includes Sundays and Holidays but excludes Custom notified holidays and port non-working days”.
• NSFT: the storage period “will include Sundays and holidays”, with no customs-holiday exclusion written into the storage notes at all.
• GTI: its definitions say the free period “shall exclude Customs notified holidays and Terminal’s non-operating days”, while the note under the dwell table says the storage period includes Sundays and Holidays. Two clauses in one document, and worth asking the terminal which governs before you argue an invoice with it.

A single customs holiday therefore changes the bill at some terminals and not at others.

Cargo class moves the rate, by different multiples

Hazardous cargo is charged more everywhere and nowhere by the same factor: 25% more at NSICT, 1.25 times at NSIGT and BMCT, 1.5 times at GTI, and 2 times at NSFT. Over-high and over-dimensional containers attract three times the normal charge at all five. If you move hazardous cargo, the ordinary rate on this page is not yours.

The dollar rates are not dollar bills

Where a terminal denominates storage in dollars, it collects rupees. NSFT’s tariff sets out the mechanism plainly: the dollar charge is reconverted at the market buying rate notified by a public sector bank “prevalent on the date of entry of the vessel into the port limits” for import containers. NSICT applies the same rule. The exchange rate that decides your invoice is therefore fixed on a date that has already passed by the time you are late, and it is not the invoice date.

These numbers have a renewal date

Each of these tariffs is a current edition, and current editions expire. NSICT’s and NSIGT’s carry the same instrument on their cover: an indexation of 0.39% granted vide IPA letter no. IPA/P&P/WPI/2025 dated 27 March 2026, effective 1 May and 1 April 2026 respectively. GTI’s Scale of Rates states the rule generally: the tariff “is subject to automatic annual indexation at 60% of the WPI”, from 1 May every year.

So the rates on this page are not a constant that can be typed into a system once. They step, on a schedule, by a published formula. Check the current edition on JNPA’s Terminal SoR page before planning against any figure here.

What this page does not publish

Your carrier’s free time, which is the other clock and usually the larger number. Demurrage on the box itself, and detention after it leaves the gate, are set in your service contract with the line. They differ between two importers whose boxes came off the same vessel, so no page can state them for you. The terminal storage charge above is the part that is a public document, and an importer who clears late pays both.

To put your own numbers against a delay, the demurrage calculator takes the free days and the per-diem tiers off your contract and publishes nothing of its own.

Where the two or three days go

Not at the terminal. They go at origin, in the week before the vessel arrives, while somebody is still asking a supplier for the certificate that has not come. Two free days is not a planning window; it is what is left after the pack is complete. That is the work demurrage management software is for: counting backwards from the last free day, and chasing whoever owes the missing paper, before the vessel lands rather than after.