Inland Waterways Authority of India Releases Ship Designs for River Ganga

Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) made public 13 standardised state-of-the-art ship designs suitable for large barge haulage on river Ganga (National Waterway-1).

This marks attaining of a critical milestone in the growth of the country’s Inland Water Transport (IWT) sector as it will help overcome the unique navigation challenges river Ganga throws due to its complex river morphology, hydraulics, acute bends, shifting channels, meanders and current.

It will serve as an enabler for domestic shipbuilding industry working on inland vessels and open huge possibilities for cargo and passenger movement on National Waterway-1.

The Government is implementing Jal Marg Vikas Project (JMVP) for capacity augmentation of navigation on NW-1 (Varanasi-Haldia stretch) with the technical assistance and investment support of the World Bank.

Even as the work on JMVP is going on in full steam, the specially designed vessels will navigate on low drafts with high carrying capacity and at the same time, environment friendly. For the shipbuilding industry, the new designs will translate into a savings of INR 3-5 millions in the building of a vessel.

 Available free on the IWAI website, the designs will remove ambiguity on the class and type of vessels that can sail  on river Ganga with efficient manoeuvrability.  They will help shipyards build vessels of standardised dimensions and capacity and make them available off the shelf besides developing the ‘sale and purchase’ market for inland vessels. The designs will lead to reduced fuel costs and in turn lesser logistics costs.

These vessels will sail even in depths of about two metres carrying about 350 cars on a five deck car carrier. Some of the designs would enable movement of bulk cargo carriers with capacity of 2500 tonnes at three metres depth, thereby, removing almost 150 truckloads of pressure from the road or one full rail rake with the plying of just one such vessel.

The new designs for various categories of dry and liquid bulk carrier, Ro-Ro vessels, car carrier, container carrier, LNG carrier, Tug Barge flotilla (Table below) have been made by M/s DST, Germany which specialises in low draft and high carrying capacity vessels. The model testings of the designs were done at Duisburg, Germany.

IWAI had awardsed the contract to M/s DST in September, 2016 through global bidding after a rigorous screening. When the Scoping Missions from World Bank first travelled on river Ganga, very typical challenges were observed unlike the trained rivers like Rhine, Danube, Mississippi and St. Lawrence Seaways which are flourishing waterways. The new designs are a result of rigorous river studies conducted by a high-level technical team comprising of experts from IWAI, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and Indian Register of Shipping with periodical technical consultations with domain experts of the World Bank.

The new designs will obviate the dependence of Indian Ship builders on foreign ship designs for IWT and prove to be a boost to ‘Make in India’ initiative of the Government.