Chittagong Port Pushes Back on NBR's 11 Day Cargo Clearance Study, Calling It One Sided

Chittagong Port Authority spent the last week of October pushing back hard against its own regulator. In a rejoinder issued this week, the CPA called a National Board of Revenue study, which found that imported consignments take roughly 11 days to clear, "misleading and one sided," arguing that most of the delay happens in places the port does not control at all.

The dispute matters well beyond the two agencies trading paperwork, because the extra days behind that 11 day figure carry a real price tag for every importer waiting on a container, an estimated $48.30 extra per box once storage charges kick in. The disagreement is really about who should answer for that bill.

• CPA says port operations account for only 14 percent of total clearance time and customs procedures another 8 percent, far less than the 11 day figure implies.
• Using its own gate data, CPA says the average time to move cargo out of the port, from vehicle entry to exit, is just five hours.
• NBR's Time Release Study found importers pay roughly $6.90 per container per day in storage fees for the first seven chargeable days once the free period ends, totalling $48.30 over the 11 day window.
• Separately, CPA says 70 to 80 percent of consignments already clear within the four day free storage period, meaning the real bottleneck sits with the 20 to 30 percent that do not.

The dispute, side by side

Measure	NBR's Time Release Study	CPA's rejoinder
Headline clearance time	About 11 days from arrival to release	Does not dispute the 11 days, disputes who causes it
Extra storage cost to importers	$6.90 per container per day for 7 chargeable days, $48.30 total	Does not challenge the figure, says port fees are not the main driver
Port's own share of delay	Not broken out in public reporting	14 percent of total clearance time is port operations
Customs' share of delay	Not broken out in public reporting	8 percent of total clearance time is customs procedures
In-port vehicle turnaround	Not measured this way	Average 5 hours gate-to-gate, 1.5 hours for on-chassis delivery

Where CPA says the real delay sits

The port authority's rejoinder leans on its own Terminal Operating System data rather than the NBR's wider process study. By CPA's count, 70 to 80 percent of import consignments already leave within the four day free storage window, which would mean the national conversation about an 11 day average is being driven by a minority of shipments, the 20 to 30 percent that linger. CPA attributes most of that lingering to other agencies entirely outside its control: the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution, quarantine authorities, the explosives department and chemical testing facilities, each of which can hold a consignment for inspection regardless of how quickly the port itself is ready to release it.

The CPA's rejoinder called the original report "misleading and one-sided," saying it had damaged the port authority's reputation and confused port users and the public, while stating it "remains committed to efficient cargo handling" and supports "better coordination among the agencies involved."

Why the storage fee side of this story is already heating up

This is not a purely academic argument about percentages. Separately, the Patenga Container Terminal has already moved to raise its own delayed cargo storage fee for less than container load cargo fourfold, from Tk68 to Tk272 per tonne per day, a charge that kicks in once the same four day free storage period CPA cites expires. The terminal operator has said 25 to 30 percent of importers do not clear goods within the allowed time and argued the old fee was too low to discourage using the port as cheap warehousing. The Chittagong Customs Agents Association has objected, warning the higher charge will raise import costs regardless of who is actually responsible for the delay. The two episodes, taken together, show a port ecosystem where everyone agrees delay is expensive and almost no one agrees whose fault it is.

A complaint with a long history

Clearance delays at Chittagong are not a new grievance dressed up in a new study. Versions of the same complaint, long queues, multiple inspecting agencies, and importers paying for storage they feel they should not owe, have surfaced periodically for years under different time release studies and different port administrations. What has changed this time is the willingness of the port authority to contest the headline number in public rather than absorb the criticism quietly, which itself says something about how much reputational and financial weight that 11 day figure now carries for an institution trying to market Chittagong as an efficient gateway to investors and shipping lines alike.

What it means for you

If you import goods through Chittagong, the practical lesson is not which agency is right but that roughly a quarter to a third of consignments are the ones absorbing almost all the extra cost, so the real savings lie in avoiding the paperwork gaps, missing certificates, and inspection queues at BSTI, quarantine or customs that push a shipment past the four day window in the first place, rather than assuming the port itself is the bottleneck. If you run a business that budgets for landed costs, build in the $48 plus per container contingency for anything that could trigger an agency hold, since that number is not in serious dispute even as the blame is. And if you are simply trying to understand why imported goods sometimes cost more than the sticker price implies, this fight over percentages is a reminder that a container's price tag includes weeks most buyers never see.