Garment makers yesterday sent their first export consignment from  Mongla Port directly to their export destinations -- a significant development for the country's apparel shipment.

The ship left Mongla  with export goods of 27 garment factories, including Fakir Apparels Ltd, Windy Apparels Ltd, KC Lingerie Ltd, Artistic Design Ltd, Knit Concern Ltd, Meghna Knit Composite Ltd and Sharmin Apparels Ltd.

The goods include various garment products such as children's clothes, jerseys and cardigans, t-shirts and trousers, reports our Bagerhat correspondent.

The garment manufacturers said the Padma Bridge has brought Mongla port in the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh closer to Dhaka, which will help in saving a lot of time and money.

These products are sent directly from the port to Poland in containers owned by several clothing manufacturers, said Rear Admiral Mohammad Musa, chairman of Mongla Port Authority (MPA).

Within a month of the Padma Bridge's inauguration, the Mongla Port has created new possibilities for garment export, he said.

Thanks to the Padma Bridge, the distance from Dhaka to Mongla port now stands at 170 kilometres, but to Chattogram it is 260 kilometres, said Md Liakat Hossain, president of the Bagerhat Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

A great deal of time gets wasted for slow unloading or loading of cargoes amid huge pressure of ships at Chattogram Port, said Syed Zahid Hossain, a clearing and forwarding and shipping agent.

"But in Mongla, there is no such pressure." Many new exporters will be interested in using this port once these garment items are exported, he said.

After the opening of the Padma Bridge, garment items are now being exported for the first time through Mongla Port, said Mustafa Kamal, the port's director for traffic.

"With this export, a new journey began."

The MPA is one of the several entities in the southern region whose operations have grown since the opening of the Padma Bridge on June 25 this year, said Hossain of the Bagerhat Chamber.

At Mongla, ship handling is quick and secure and it saves a lot of time and money as the distance to Dhaka has decreased because of the Padma Bridge, he said.

The Mongla port has registered 17 per cent annual average growth in ship handling since 2012, while the volume of cargo handling grew 19 per cent over the past decade.

The port can handle one crore tonnes of cargo, 100,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUS) of containers, and 20,000 cars annually.

In 2020-21, cargo handling stood at 1.19 crore tonnes, just double the volume five years ago. Container handling by the second biggest seaport after Chattogram dropped 26 per cent year-on-year to 43,959 TEUs in the fiscal year 2021-22 from previous year's 59,476 TEUs, highest in seven years, according to the MPA.