With Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) spending huge sums for dredging, establishing terminals, and enabling upkeep of national waterways since 1986, at least 1,000 cargo ships must operate along them in the coming five years to make them commercially viable, chairperson of the agency Nutan Guha Biswas has said.
Issues such as accumulation of silt, encroachments, and low-lying bridges having low horizontal clearance should be tackled so that 1,500 to 2,000 tonnage vessels could operate along them. The private sector could pool in with considerable help, by introducing vessels and training the local populace in different aspects of navigation.
Ship-repair yards too should come up along the coastline, she said while addressing a national-level Coastal Shipping and Inland Water Transport Business Summit organised here on Friday.
She lamented that India’s share of water transport was lesser compared to other nations, including Bangladesh and Vietnam, despite the country having a 7,500-km long coastline. State governments too could help promote waterway-based movement of cargo and passengers, thus decongesting overburdened roads and lessening accidents and pollution.
While funds are aplenty to develop and maintain waterways, industries and other stakeholders should gradually shift transportation of hazardous and other cargo from road and railway to water transport, Ms. Biswas said.
Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the summit, she said the narrow Thiruvananthapuram- Kochi NH could be decongested if a portion of cargo took the waterway route through the under-utilised Kollam-Kottapuram National Waterway III which was commissioned a few years ago.
It also had huge tourism potential, since cruise ships ferry foreign and domestic tourists along the national waterways on Ganges and Brahmaputra on journeys that last up to a week.
Many speakers lamented that the stranglehold of surface transport lobby was so strong that even public sector units were resisting shift transporting through waterways.
CMD of Cochin Shipyard Madhu S. Nair said that inland water transport (IWT) and coastal shipping could be a game-changer. ‘‘We are already engaged in setting up a shipyard in Kolkata, to build modern, fuel efficient vessels capable of operating in inland waterways and coastal waters. Care must be taken to prevent old, ill-maintained vessels from being dumped into India,’’ he said.
Additional Chief Secretary (Department of Industry and Commerce) Paul Antony sought ₹4.60 crore Central funds to strengthen the berth in Kottayam port so that container movement got a boost in the waterway linking it with Kochi.
