IWAI has identified six water to be developed in India.
Visakhapatnam: National Waterway 4 that runs from Andhra Pradesh has remained a non-starter, and world renowned expert in inland shipping, Europe’s Port of Antwerp International, has now come forward and offered its expertise to develop it. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) has identified six waterways across the country to be developed. Though India, particularly AP, has an extensive network of inland waterways in the form of creeks, canals, rivers and backwaters, there has been very little effort to tap their potential.
Of the total six national waterways proposed by IWAI, AP has one planned between the Kakinada and Pondicherry stretch of canals and the Kaluvelly Tank, the Bhadrachalam-Rajahmundry stretch of River Godavari and the Wazirabad-Vijayawada stretch of River Krishna along 1,078 km. The AP government had approached the Port of Antwerp representatives to conduct a study on the prospects of National Waterway 4 during the India Maritime Summit, held at Mumbai in April.
The Port of Antwerp had just completed such a study, funded by World Bank, on National Waterway 1, stretched between Allahabad-Haldia of the Ganges-Bhagirathi-Hooghly river system with a length of 1,620 km. “We are going to submit the study report of National Waterway 1 to the IWAI within a week. It took five months for us to study and prepare the report. Andhra Pradesh government officials had approached us for a similar study on National Waterway 4 that primarily runs in the state. The meeting, which was scheduled to be held on Friday, with the state director of ports on final negotiations has been postponed to next week. We are ready to offer our consultancy on developing National Waterway 4,” Port of Antwerp International, port projects, director Marc Paelinck, told this correspondent.
As per a Detailed Project Report (DPR) prepared by Water and Power Consultancy Services Limited (WAPCOS) in March 2010, it will take a minimum of 10 years for the National Waterway 4 project to be completed and the work has not yet been set to the ground. Chief Commercial Officer of Antwerp Port Authority, Luc Arnouts, observed that while 35 per cent of cargo moved by inland waterways in Belgium, it’s only one per cent in India and had very high potential. Three other waterways NW 1, 2 and 3, across the Ganga, Brahmaputra and West coast canal respectively, had been running successfully, handling cargo.
During 2013-14, these three national waterways handled 6,890,493 metric tonnes of cargo. WAPCOS estimated that the total costs to develop the National Waterway in AP would be around Rs 1,515 crore. The Inland Waterways Authority of India identified that the Kakinada-Puducherry stretch, christened National Waterway 4, had the potential of 11 million tonnes of cargo transportation every year due the presence of Kakinada, Machilipatnam, Chennai and Ennore ports. The projected cargo included coal, rice, food grains, cement and fertilisers.
