Chennai Port (port code: INMAA), formerly known as Madras Port, is the second largest container port of India. It is situated on the Coromandel coast in southeast India.
Covering a total of 237.5 hectares of land area and almost 170 hectares of water area, the port has a main harbour enclosed by a breakwater with an entrance protected by an off-lying groyne. On the north side of the main harbour lies Bharathi Dock, sheltered from the north and east and Jawahar Dock lies on the south side of the main harbour. Ambedkar Dock is situated in between these docks and has 8 berths for handling cleaner cargoes. The harbour is completely artificial and has facilities for most cargoes.
The port offers ample cargo-handling equipment. It has a 150-ton capacity floating crane and three 10-ton capacity mobile cranes. It also has ten 3-ton diesel forklift trucks and ten high-capacity diesel forklift trucks (three 10-ton, five 15-ton, and two 25-ton), two 3-ton payloaders and 14 diesel electric locomotives. The Coal Conveyor at the port is a semi-mechanized closed system with capacity for 15 million tons per year and capacity to handle 1500 tons per hour.
The port has a container terminal that covers 21.1 hectares and can handle 12.6 thousand TEUs, 300 reefer plugs, and 51 ground slots, and an international container terminal that serves automobile, textiles, pharmaceuticals, leather, light engineering, and chemical manufacturing industries and covers an area of 35 hectares with a handling capacity of 1.5 million TEUs and 5424 ground slots with 168 reefer points. The port also features bulk and breakbulk terminals, oil / liquid terminals, Ro-ro terminals and cruise terminals.
The port currently has the capacity to handle 3,000,000 TEUs and with the commissioning of the third mega container terminal being planned, the capacity would go up to 8,000,000 TEUs. It handles approximately 1,900 vessels, 61,100,000t of cargo including 1,129,700TEU annually. The port’s long-term plan focuses on the "4 Cs:" containers, cars, cruises, and clean cargo. The main exports from this port include iron ore, granite, mineral oils and other POL, textiles excluding cotton yarn, onions, tobacco, leather goods, bone and bone meal, sugar, food grains, quartz, barytes, feldspar and general cargo. The principal imports are mineral oils, vehicles, project cargoes, machinery, food grains, coal and chemical fertilisers.