Dry Ports and Inland Clearance Depots (ICDs) of Nepal: Directory

A dry port — formally an Inland Clearance Depot (ICD) or Inland Container Depot — is a customs-controlled terminal located away from any seacoast where containers and cargo can be received, stored, stuffed, de-stuffed and cleared through customs, exactly as they would be at a seaport. For Nepal, a landlocked country whose nearest ocean gateway (Kolkata, India) lies hundreds of kilometres away, dry ports are the point where international shipping effectively 'arrives' in the country. Goods move under customs seal from an Indian seaport by rail or truck to a Nepali ICD, where duties are assessed and the consignment enters domestic circulation.

Nepal's dry-port network was built in stages. Three depots — the rail-linked Birgunj ICD and the road-based Biratnagar and Bhairahawa ICDs — were completed around 2000 (2056–57 BS) with World Bank assistance under the Nepal Multimodal Transit and Trade Facilitation Project. A fourth road-based depot at Kakarbhitta followed in 2010 with an Asian Development Bank (ADB) soft loan, and the Chobhar Dry Port inside Kathmandu Valley opened in April 2022 (Chaitra 2078 BS) under a World Bank-financed project. A sixth facility at Dodhara-Chandani in far-western Nepal is now under construction with Indian grant assistance.

The complete list of major operating and planned facilities is below. China-border depots at Larcha (Tatopani) and Timure (Rasuwa) extend the same model to Nepal's northern trade corridors.

Every major dry port in Nepal is developed and overseen by the Nepal Intermodal Transport Development Board (NITDB), established by the Government of Nepal on 19 January 1998 (2054 BS) under the Development Board Act, 1956 (2013 BS). The board is a deliberate public–private partnership: it is chaired by the Secretary of the commerce ministry and includes the Deputy Governor of Nepal Rastra Bank, the Director General of the Department of Customs and the presidents of private-sector bodies such as the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI), the Nepal Chamber of Commerce and the Nepal Freight Forwarders Association.

NITDB's mandate is to develop, manage and promote ICD terminals, lease their day-to-day operation to private companies selected through international competitive bidding, set criteria for terminal service charges, and conclude railway operation agreements with Indian Railways for cargo movement to and from the rail-linked depot at Birgunj. After early operators of the first ICDs ran losses under fixed-rent leases, the board shifted to a minimum-rent-plus-revenue-sharing model, which has kept the terminals commercially viable ever since. Customs functions inside every dry port remain with the Department of Customs, which stations dedicated customs offices at each facility.

The Birgunj Inland Clearance Depot at Sirsiya, Parsa district — universally known as the Birgunj dry port — is the flagship of the network and the only Nepali dry port connected directly to the Indian Railways system. Roughly five kilometres of cross-border track link Sirsiya to Raxaul in Bihar, from where broad-gauge freight trains run to and from the seaports of Kolkata and Haldia in West Bengal and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. The facility spreads over about 38 hectares, has six full-rake railway sidings, a container yard with storage capacity of roughly 1,568 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), and two large warehouses, including a 7,000-square-metre container freight station.

Built with World Bank assistance around 2000, the depot could only begin full commercial operation in 2004 (2061 BS), once the Nepal–India Rail Services Agreement had been concluded to govern train movements across the border. From 2004 it was managed by Himalayan Terminals Pvt. Ltd., a joint venture involving India's state-owned Container Corporation of India (CONCOR); in 2020 NITDB awarded the terminal management contract to Pristine Valley Dryport Pvt. Ltd. The depot handles upwards of 20,000 TEU of containers and break-bulk cargo a year — the largest share of Nepal's containerised third-country trade — and the adjoining Birgunj Integrated Check Post (ICP) processes road cargo on the same corridor, which carries more of Nepal's foreign trade than any other border point.

Three road-based inland clearance depots serve Nepal's other main trade corridors with India. The Biratnagar ICD in Morang district (near the Biratnagar–Jogbani crossing) and the Bhairahawa ICD in Rupandehi district (on the Bhairahawa–Sunauli corridor) were both completed in 2000 under the World Bank-financed project and began commercial operation in 2002 (2058–59 BS) after being leased to a private operator. Both have long been run by TransNepal Freight Services Pvt. Ltd., a Nepali company incorporated in 2002 in joint venture with the Indian multinational Allcargo Logistics. Cargo reaches these depots by truck from Kolkata/Haldia and other permitted Indian ports under the Nepal–India transit regime.

The Kakarbhitta ICD in Jhapa district, at Nepal's easternmost border crossing with India on the Asian Highway (AH02), was completed around 2010 (2066–67 BS) at a cost of about Rs 393 million financed through an ADB soft loan. The 7.5-hectare depot includes a 1,395-square-metre warehouse, a 1,780-square-metre inspection shed and parking for about 80 trucks. NITDB itself ran the facility for a decade before TransNepal Freight Services won a five-year operating lease in December 2020, with the contract awarded in February 2021. Kakarbhitta is strategically placed on the corridor toward Bangladesh via India's Panitanki–Phulbari route, giving it a role in Nepal–Bangladesh trade as well.

These ICDs should not be confused with the newer Integrated Check Posts built with Indian assistance at the same border towns — for example the ICP Biratnagar, jointly inaugurated by prime ministers K.P. Sharma Oli and Narendra Modi by video link on 21 January 2020, which combines customs, immigration and quarantine services for road cargo at the Jogbani border.

The Chobhar Dry Port in Kirtipur Municipality, on the south-western edge of Kathmandu Valley, is Nepal's newest operating ICD and the first located away from a border. It was built on 11.77 hectares of the former Himal Cement factory site at a cost of about Rs 1.54 billion under a World Bank-financed trade and transport project. Then prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli laid the foundation stone on 18 January 2019 (Magh 2075 BS), and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba inaugurated the facility on 5 April 2022 (Chaitra 2078 BS).

The dry port provides parking for around 500 containers and 500 trucks, an export–import section rated at about 116 TEU, three warehouses, customs and quarantine buildings and weighbridges. Its core purpose is to let Kathmandu Valley importers and exporters complete customs clearance near the capital instead of at distant border depots, cutting time and handling costs. NITDB operated the terminal itself at first; in November 2023 a TransNepal Freight Services joint venture won an international bid and took over operation in December 2023 under a five-year agreement worth a minimum of Rs 28.8 million to the board. The port has also opened a domestic cargo terminal, and its long-term traffic is expected to grow as valley-bound consignments shift from border clearance to Chobhar.

The next addition to the directory is the Dodhara-Chandani Dry Port in Kanchanpur district, Sudurpashchim Province — the first dry port for Nepal's far west. Located across the Mahakali river in Dodhara Chandani Municipality, adjacent to India's Uttarakhand state, the project is being built with Government of India grant assistance. India's state engineering firm RITES Ltd tendered the works in January 2025, and the construction contract, worth about IRs 2.4 billion, was awarded to COMT Construction Pvt. Ltd. The site was handed over in July 2025 and construction began in December 2025 on a 30-month timeline; by May 2026 physical progress had crossed 10 percent. Supporting infrastructure — a four-lane motorable bridge over the Mahakali and an eight-kilometre, six-lane access road from Gaddachauki — is already complete, and India is building a matching integrated check post about 200 metres away on its side. Once open, the port is expected to slash transport costs for Sudurpashchim's trade by connecting it directly to Indian road and rail routes toward Delhi, Gujarat and the seaports.

On the northern border, the same dry-port model serves trade with China. A Chinese-assisted depot at Larcha, near the Tatopani–Zhangmu (Khasa) crossing in Sindhupalchok on the Araniko Highway, came into operation in 2019 after the corridor reopened following the 2015 earthquake. A second China-border facility at Timure in Rasuwa district, on the Rasuwagadhi–Kerung corridor, has been under development since NITDB signed a construction agreement with China's Tibet Fuli Construction Group in May 2019, with Chinese aid estimated at about 124 million yuan. These northern depots handle road cargo only, as no railway yet crosses the Nepal–China border.

Every Nepali dry port ultimately exists to shorten the supply chain from an ocean port. Under the Nepal–India Treaty of Transit, Kolkata Port (with Haldia) in West Bengal has long been the designated gateway for Nepal's third-country trade, feeding cargo to Birgunj by rail and to the road-based ICDs by truck. In February 2016 the two governments exchanged letters allowing Nepal to also use Visakhapatnam Port in Andhra Pradesh, a deeper and less congested harbour that now sends container rakes directly to the Birgunj ICD. The revision of the transit treaty concluded in 2023 further opened India's Mundra Port (Gujarat) and Dhamra Port (Odisha) to Nepali traders and incorporated the use of Indian inland waterways.

It also helps to keep the vocabulary straight, because Nepali media use several overlapping terms. A dry port or ICD is a cargo terminal — container yard, warehouses and customs clearance under one roof — owned by NITDB and run by a leased private operator. An Integrated Check Post (ICP), such as those at Birgunj, Biratnagar and (under construction) Bhairahawa and Nepalgunj, is a border-crossing complex built with Indian assistance that consolidates customs, immigration, quarantine and security for traffic moving across the frontier. The two are complementary: at Birgunj, for instance, rail containers clear at the Sirsiya ICD while trucks pass through the adjacent ICP. For exam purposes, remember that Birgunj is Nepal's only rail-linked dry port, Chobhar is the only one inside Kathmandu Valley, and Dodhara-Chandani will be the first in Sudurpashchim Province.