Almost a month after setting sail from Kahalgaon in Bihar, two 1,000-tonne barges carrying 1,233 tonnes of bagged fly ash reached western Assam’s Dhubri via Bangladesh on Wednesday morning.
The crossing over of the barges into India at Chilmari border in Dhubri district marked the beginning of a new era for inland water transport.
Cargo transport on such a scale had never been tried across two of the country’s largest river systems — Ganga and Brahmaputra.
2,085-km trip
The barges carrying fly ash from National Thermal Power Corporation’s Kahalgaon power plant were flagged off on August 30. Officials of the Inland Waterways Authority (IWAI) had estimated that the 2,085-km trip to Pandu port at Guwahati would take 20 days.
“On the Ganga, the barges exited the country on the West Bengal border on September 11. They took 15 days to travel on the Padma and Jamuna before sailing into the Brahmaputra. The time taken is more than we had estimated, but the good thing is everything has gone smoothly,” said an IWAI officer.
The Ganga flows into Bangladesh as the Padma and meets Jamuna, which is the stretch of Brahmaputra in that country.
“The barges should take another three days to traverse the 200-km distance from Dhubri to Pandu,” Bharat Bhushan Dev Choudhury, director of Assam’s Inland Water Transport Department, told The Hindu.
Better ferries
Smarting from a series of boat mishaps on the Brahmaputra and its tributaries that killed at least six people in September, the Assam government has started work on a ₹10 crore project to improve the river transport infrastructure.
“We have received ₹100 crore from the World Bank for improving the inland water transport system with modern ferries that can carry 200 people and eight heavy trucks,” Transport Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary told the Assembly on Wednesday.
