Image ref 153192135. Shutterstock New Mooring Container Terminal
Bangladesh’s ports exist at a paradoxical crossroads of sovereignty and survival. Chattogram Port, where ships arrive and leave, is Bangladesh’s strategic artery for seaborne trade. Chattogram processes 95% of Bangladesh’s export cargoes, and more than three-quarters of seaborne imports, making it the lifeblood of Bangladesh’s logistics and industry. It is also a site of long-running bottlenecks and rent-seeking, with terminal expansions repeatedly threatened by the conjunction of politicized contracting and chronic under-investment. The interim government’s decisions late-2025 to lease or award the operations of the major Chattogram terminals New Mooring Container Terminal (NCT) to DP World, Laldia Container Terminal to APM Terminals/Maersk and Pangaon Inland Container Terminal to Medlog have therefore catalyzed a national controversy that is less about “foreigners vs locals” than who can control rents from this strategic chokepoint, and on what terms.
Okay, let's not mince words. The potential upsides of bringing in international port operators are real and include capital, technology, and institutional discipline. Bangladesh has been trying to kick-start growth, but hasn't been able to do so rapidly. Container terminals are no longer simple yards with a bunch of cranes on top; they are complex, data-intensive logistics platforms. DP World, APM Terminals, or someone else will have networks of automated gate systems, vessel-planning software, yard-stacking algorithms, and predictive maintenance regimes honed across multiple ports around the world. Now imagine that technical capacity and digital connectivity can be bought, properly installed, and scaled. In that case, ships spend less time in port, containers spend less time on the ground, and exporters suffer from fewer missed sailings. Bangladesh’s business bodies have been unanimous that they are not opposed to foreign operators per se, but only want anyone, foreign or domestic, who can make a credible case for efficiency. Bangladesh’s business bodies have been unanimous that they are not opposed to foreign operators per se, but only want anyone, foreign or domestic, who can make a credible case for efficiency.
The second plus is scale. Global operators can link a port terminal to shipping alliances and feeder networks. That matters for a country that aspires to move beyond basic garment exports to higher-value, time-sensitive products. If Chattogram can use foreign capital to reduce vessel waiting times, shorten truck queues, and increase visibility, Bangladesh will become a more reliable node for “China+1” supply chains. The government has made much the same case itself: that foreign investment and know-how can help expand capacity, reduce port congestion, and root out entrenched corruption by introducing more transparent performance standards.
Third, foreign operators shift some risk off the public balance sheet. A properly structured concession gets the operator to invest upfront and then recoup those costs over time via regulated tariffs and commercial volume growth. Bangladesh has several port and maritime projects that are semi-abandoned, because public procurement is slow and/or incentives are not aligned; a professional concession should, in theory, accelerate construction. And in a region where Colombo, Singapore, and Indian ports are all aggressively courting transshipment and industrial cargo, Bangladesh cannot afford to be the slowest gateway in the Bay of Bengal.
These are the pluses. The downsides are more in the domains of politics, governance, and the lived realities of the precedents.
First, procedural legitimacy. Business, labor, and civil society voices have not rejected foreign participation per se; their complaint is with the secrecy and lack of competitiveness of the process. Several recent op-eds have made this point: government-to-government-style deals or opaque contract award processes are reruns of old mistakes and entail obvious legal and reputational risks. Without a demonstrable, transparent tender process with independent valuation and credible contract terms (performance/termination conditions spelled out in advance), activists have low-hanging fruit: the narrative that national assets are being gifted away for free.
The second con is tariff and monopoly risk. Ports have strong natural-monopoly characteristics: a single operator of the largest terminals in Chattogram can set a significant share of the trade cost structure. When port service charges were jacked up in 2025, the protests were real because the port users saw the hikes as part of a broader effort to “prepare the ground” for the foreign handovers. The specific charge there is contestable, but the fear of price gouging is rational: tariff increases with no visible service upgrade squeeze exporters and importers and harm competitiveness.
The third risk is labor and national capability risk. The dockworkers’ strikes and hunger-strike protests at the port are not an act of reflexive nationalism. The real anxiety behind the unrest is job security and dignity. International operators are going to streamline staff and increase subcontracting. The state will have to negotiate worker protections, retraining, and union buy-in credibly; otherwise, labor disruptions will be a recurring cost.
Fourth, strategic dependence. Bangladesh is not naïve about geopolitics. We have seen how Sri Lanka’s ports, Pakistani ports, and ports in parts of Africa are turned into commercial spaces where contracts can quickly become sources of diplomatic leverage. Leasing port terminals to foreign firms is not the same as selling sovereignty. But suppose all major gateways are concentrated under the same narrow set of external actors, without countervailing regulatory power. In that case, it will shrink Dhaka’s room to maneuver amid political pressure.
Finally, the sobering reality of mixed outcomes. The Patenga Container Terminal has been operated by the Saudi-based Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT) since 2024, and has been regularly lambasted by users over low throughput and apparent mismanagement; reported daily handling rates have been well below capacity for the better part of its tenure. That's neither evidence that foreign operators are a bad idea nor that a Bangladeshi firm will, by default, perform better. What it does indicate is that contract design, oversight, and how those interface with the local logistics ecosystems are much more important than the operator's passport.
The modus operandi has mostly been politicized non-competitive contracting, especially at the country’s busiest and most profitable container terminal, Chattogram’s New Mooring Container Terminal (NMCT). Investigative reporting and prominent newspaper write-ups over the past couple of years have unearthed how direct procurement methods (DPM) have been systematically used to renew and re-award terminal operation contracts to domestic favorites, effectively short-circuiting open tender processes. The latest from Prothom Alo this year is one of several similar stories: NMCT contracts have been renewed several times over DPM, essentially turning into multi-billion taka sweetheart deals. The core allegation is not just inefficiency but that the competitive field has been consciously narrowed to ensure that rents continue to flow to politically connected players.
Overlaying that is a second layer of tender manipulation and project irregularities. In recent months, the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Anti-Corruption Commission have both issued reports replete with damning findings on large-scale anomalies at the Chattogram Port Authority, collectively running into well over a thousand crore taka in suspect spending for the FY2023-24 financial year and featuring dozens of separate instances of tender manipulation and corruption in contract management. They are the institutional confirmation of what those involved in the port economy have been whispering to each other in darkened rooms for years: inflated procurement costs, fixed service contracts, and invisible side-payments, which, in the end, manifest as time lost, demurrage costs, and increased logistics costs.
Beyond that, there are the older allegations of individualized graft networks embedded in port operations: bribes for berthing priority, equipment scrapping, container release, trucking access, and so on. Recent newspaper reports have unearthed alleged corruption rings at work within key divisions, some of them long-running and well over a decade old. Each specific allegation must be evaluated in the context of verifiable evidence. Still, the recurrence of similar stories across different media outlets and time periods does point to a systemic problem: too much discretionary power at multiple choke points.
The result of all that has been visible in the form of under-utilized or delayed infrastructure. Bangladesh has repeatedly witnessed the construction or expansion of port facilities only for operator selection or governance processes to break down into procedural quagmires. A case in point is the Single Point Mooring (SPM) oil import terminal off Maheshkhali: a multi-billion-taka project left idle for years due to faulty tender specifications and repeated inability to attract an operator with the necessary technical expertise. It is not a container terminal, but comes under the same maritime governance umbrella, and is subject to the same procurement vulnerabilities that have turned national investment into dead capital.
Put those pieces together, and you have the actual story of the last decade or so: a port economy where efficiency was sacrificed at the altar of cash-flow control. Terminal rights, stevedoring contracts, transport permits, and procurement deals were all political trophies. Exporters had to maintain padded lead times, importers paid demurrage, and ultimately the costs were shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices.
The one piece missing from that account of things, until very recently, was labor. Which brings us to today’s protests and their accompanying hypocrisy. Several of today’s loudest “sovereignty” voices were conspicuously silent or complicit when domestic concessionaires were repeatedly renewed with zero competition. In some cases, the same labor-adjacent or business groups that now are accusing foreign operators of being a national threat benefited from the old order’s informal rents: priority access and union-brokered staffing or subcontracting relationships. Recent reporting notes that these protests were also reignited right after the government decided to hand over major terminals to foreign firms, even as port stakeholders privately acknowledge that the old model was broken.
Fine. So, what does an honest nationalist position look like? It is not “no foreigners”. It is not “foreigners will save us”. The honest, workable position is: Bangladesh must have world-class ports. Anyone, local or foreign, may operate those terminals, but only through transparent, competitive processes with enforceable public-interest safeguards.
That means four non-negotiables. The first is open tendering with published bid criteria, evaluation scores, and complete contract disclosure, with the narrowest security redactions. The public has learned to distrust black-box deals, and that is a habit of mind it will not easily shed. The second is an independent port regulator to set tariff ceilings, service benchmarks, and anti-monopoly rules, so that no operator can hold trade hostage. The third is a credible labor compact with job guarantees, training funds, and productivity-linked wage pathways, so efficiency does not become a synonym for dispossession. The fourth is a domestic capability plan: any foreign operator must partner with Bangladeshi firms, train local managers, and embed technology transfer, so that a decade from now, Bangladesh can run global terminals on its own terms.
If those conditions are met, international operations can be an instrument of national strength. If those conditions are not met, it will simply replicate the last decade’s miscreancy, just under a different flag, and substitute foreign monopoly for domestic oligopoly.
Bangladesh’s port argument, then, is the mirror image of Bangladesh’s governance challenge. Bangladesh is not choosing between nationalism and globalization. It is a choice between a rules-based port economy and a rent-based one. Those who looted the system yesterday and wrap themselves in the flag today should be called what they are: not defenders of the republic, but defenders of rents. And those who believe foreign expertise and investment are a necessity must accept that legitimacy comes not from hurried deals signed in the dark, but from transparency and performance.
The Bay of Bengal will not wait for Bangladesh to work through that debate. Ships will route where time is predictable, and investment will only follow where regulation is credible. The port that Bangladesh deserves is one where cranes move because the system is intelligent, not because someone paid; where contracts are won because bids are best, not because connections are deep; and where the question “foreign or local?” fades because the answer to a harder one has been honestly answered: “efficient and accountable, or captured and corrupt?”
Image ref 153192135. Shutterstock New Mooring Container Terminal
Bangladesh’s ports exist at a paradoxical crossroads of sovereignty and survival. Chattogram Port, where ships arrive and leave, is Bangladesh’s strategic artery for seaborne trade. Chattogram processes 95% of Bangladesh’s export cargoes, and more than three-quarters of seaborne imports, making it the lifeblood of Bangladesh’s logistics and industry. It is also a site of long-running bottlenecks and rent-seeking, with terminal expansions repeatedly threatened by the conjunction of politicized contracting and chronic under-investment. The interim government’s decisions late-2025 to lease or award the operations of the major Chattogram terminals New Mooring Container Terminal (NCT) to DP World, Laldia Container Terminal to APM Terminals/Maersk and Pangaon Inland Container Terminal to Medlog have therefore catalyzed a national controversy that is less about “foreigners vs locals” than who can control rents from this strategic chokepoint, and on what terms.
Okay, let's not mince words. The potential upsides of bringing in international port operators are real and include capital, technology, and institutional discipline. Bangladesh has been trying to kick-start growth, but hasn't been able to do so rapidly. Container terminals are no longer simple yards with a bunch of cranes on top; they are complex, data-intensive logistics platforms. DP World, APM Terminals, or someone else will have networks of automated gate systems, vessel-planning software, yard-stacking algorithms, and predictive maintenance regimes honed across multiple ports around the world. Now imagine that technical capacity and digital connectivity can be bought, properly installed, and scaled. In that case, ships spend less time in port, containers spend less time on the ground, and exporters suffer from fewer missed sailings. Bangladesh’s business bodies have been unanimous that they are not opposed to foreign operators per se, but only want anyone, foreign or domestic, who can make a credible case for efficiency. Bangladesh’s business bodies have been unanimous that they are not opposed to foreign operators per se, but only want anyone, foreign or domestic, who can make a credible case for efficiency.
The second plus is scale. Global operators can link a port terminal to shipping alliances and feeder networks. That matters for a country that aspires to move beyond basic garment exports to higher-value, time-sensitive products. If Chattogram can use foreign capital to reduce vessel waiting times, shorten truck queues, and increase visibility, Bangladesh will become a more reliable node for “China+1” supply chains. The government has made much the same case itself: that foreign investment and know-how can help expand capacity, reduce port congestion, and root out entrenched corruption by introducing more transparent performance standards.
Third, foreign operators shift some risk off the public balance sheet. A properly structured concession gets the operator to invest upfront and then recoup those costs over time via regulated tariffs and commercial volume growth. Bangladesh has several port and maritime projects that are semi-abandoned, because public procurement is slow and/or incentives are not aligned; a professional concession should, in theory, accelerate construction. And in a region where Colombo, Singapore, and Indian ports are all aggressively courting transshipment and industrial cargo, Bangladesh cannot afford to be the slowest gateway in the Bay of Bengal.
These are the pluses. The downsides are more in the domains of politics, governance, and the lived realities of the precedents.
First, procedural legitimacy. Business, labor, and civil society voices have not rejected foreign participation per se; their complaint is with the secrecy and lack of competitiveness of the process. Several recent op-eds have made this point: government-to-government-style deals or opaque contract award processes are reruns of old mistakes and entail obvious legal and reputational risks. Without a demonstrable, transparent tender process with independent valuation and credible contract terms (performance/termination conditions spelled out in advance), activists have low-hanging fruit: the narrative that national assets are being gifted away for free.
The second con is tariff and monopoly risk. Ports have strong natural-monopoly characteristics: a single operator of the largest terminals in Chattogram can set a significant share of the trade cost structure. When port service charges were jacked up in 2025, the protests were real because the port users saw the hikes as part of a broader effort to “prepare the ground” for the foreign handovers. The specific charge there is contestable, but the fear of price gouging is rational: tariff increases with no visible service upgrade squeeze exporters and importers and harm competitiveness.
The third risk is labor and national capability risk. The dockworkers’ strikes and hunger-strike protests at the port are not an act of reflexive nationalism. The real anxiety behind the unrest is job security and dignity. International operators are going to streamline staff and increase subcontracting. The state will have to negotiate worker protections, retraining, and union buy-in credibly; otherwise, labor disruptions will be a recurring cost.
Fourth, strategic dependence. Bangladesh is not naïve about geopolitics. We have seen how Sri Lanka’s ports, Pakistani ports, and ports in parts of Africa are turned into commercial spaces where contracts can quickly become sources of diplomatic leverage. Leasing port terminals to foreign firms is not the same as selling sovereignty. But suppose all major gateways are concentrated under the same narrow set of external actors, without countervailing regulatory power. In that case, it will shrink Dhaka’s room to maneuver amid political pressure.
Finally, the sobering reality of mixed outcomes. The Patenga Container Terminal has been operated by the Saudi-based Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT) since 2024, and has been regularly lambasted by users over low throughput and apparent mismanagement; reported daily handling rates have been well below capacity for the better part of its tenure. That's neither evidence that foreign operators are a bad idea nor that a Bangladeshi firm will, by default, perform better. What it does indicate is that contract design, oversight, and how those interface with the local logistics ecosystems are much more important than the operator's passport.
The modus operandi has mostly been politicized non-competitive contracting, especially at the country’s busiest and most profitable container terminal, Chattogram’s New Mooring Container Terminal (NMCT). Investigative reporting and prominent newspaper write-ups over the past couple of years have unearthed how direct procurement methods (DPM) have been systematically used to renew and re-award terminal operation contracts to domestic favorites, effectively short-circuiting open tender processes. The latest from Prothom Alo this year is one of several similar stories: NMCT contracts have been renewed several times over DPM, essentially turning into multi-billion taka sweetheart deals. The core allegation is not just inefficiency but that the competitive field has been consciously narrowed to ensure that rents continue to flow to politically connected players.
Overlaying that is a second layer of tender manipulation and project irregularities. In recent months, the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Anti-Corruption Commission have both issued reports replete with damning findings on large-scale anomalies at the Chattogram Port Authority, collectively running into well over a thousand crore taka in suspect spending for the FY2023-24 financial year and featuring dozens of separate instances of tender manipulation and corruption in contract management. They are the institutional confirmation of what those involved in the port economy have been whispering to each other in darkened rooms for years: inflated procurement costs, fixed service contracts, and invisible side-payments, which, in the end, manifest as time lost, demurrage costs, and increased logistics costs.
Beyond that, there are the older allegations of individualized graft networks embedded in port operations: bribes for berthing priority, equipment scrapping, container release, trucking access, and so on. Recent newspaper reports have unearthed alleged corruption rings at work within key divisions, some of them long-running and well over a decade old. Each specific allegation must be evaluated in the context of verifiable evidence. Still, the recurrence of similar stories across different media outlets and time periods does point to a systemic problem: too much discretionary power at multiple choke points.
The result of all that has been visible in the form of under-utilized or delayed infrastructure. Bangladesh has repeatedly witnessed the construction or expansion of port facilities only for operator selection or governance processes to break down into procedural quagmires. A case in point is the Single Point Mooring (SPM) oil import terminal off Maheshkhali: a multi-billion-taka project left idle for years due to faulty tender specifications and repeated inability to attract an operator with the necessary technical expertise. It is not a container terminal, but comes under the same maritime governance umbrella, and is subject to the same procurement vulnerabilities that have turned national investment into dead capital.
Put those pieces together, and you have the actual story of the last decade or so: a port economy where efficiency was sacrificed at the altar of cash-flow control. Terminal rights, stevedoring contracts, transport permits, and procurement deals were all political trophies. Exporters had to maintain padded lead times, importers paid demurrage, and ultimately the costs were shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices.
The one piece missing from that account of things, until very recently, was labor. Which brings us to today’s protests and their accompanying hypocrisy. Several of today’s loudest “sovereignty” voices were conspicuously silent or complicit when domestic concessionaires were repeatedly renewed with zero competition. In some cases, the same labor-adjacent or business groups that now are accusing foreign operators of being a national threat benefited from the old order’s informal rents: priority access and union-brokered staffing or subcontracting relationships. Recent reporting notes that these protests were also reignited right after the government decided to hand over major terminals to foreign firms, even as port stakeholders privately acknowledge that the old model was broken.
Fine. So, what does an honest nationalist position look like? It is not “no foreigners”. It is not “foreigners will save us”. The honest, workable position is: Bangladesh must have world-class ports. Anyone, local or foreign, may operate those terminals, but only through transparent, competitive processes with enforceable public-interest safeguards.
That means four non-negotiables. The first is open tendering with published bid criteria, evaluation scores, and complete contract disclosure, with the narrowest security redactions. The public has learned to distrust black-box deals, and that is a habit of mind it will not easily shed. The second is an independent port regulator to set tariff ceilings, service benchmarks, and anti-monopoly rules, so that no operator can hold trade hostage. The third is a credible labor compact with job guarantees, training funds, and productivity-linked wage pathways, so efficiency does not become a synonym for dispossession. The fourth is a domestic capability plan: any foreign operator must partner with Bangladeshi firms, train local managers, and embed technology transfer, so that a decade from now, Bangladesh can run global terminals on its own terms.
If those conditions are met, international operations can be an instrument of national strength. If those conditions are not met, it will simply replicate the last decade’s miscreancy, just under a different flag, and substitute foreign monopoly for domestic oligopoly.
Bangladesh’s port argument, then, is the mirror image of Bangladesh’s governance challenge. Bangladesh is not choosing between nationalism and globalization. It is a choice between a rules-based port economy and a rent-based one. Those who looted the system yesterday and wrap themselves in the flag today should be called what they are: not defenders of the republic, but defenders of rents. And those who believe foreign expertise and investment are a necessity must accept that legitimacy comes not from hurried deals signed in the dark, but from transparency and performance.
The Bay of Bengal will not wait for Bangladesh to work through that debate. Ships will route where time is predictable, and investment will only follow where regulation is credible. The port that Bangladesh deserves is one where cranes move because the system is intelligent, not because someone paid; where contracts are won because bids are best, not because connections are deep; and where the question “foreign or local?” fades because the answer to a harder one has been honestly answered: “efficient and accountable, or captured and corrupt?”
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