Looks like Corporate India is keen on tapping the potential of inland waterways to reach the customers faster and to save on costs.
After the successful transportation of cargo containers from Kolkata to Varanasi earlier this year, the shipping of 16 twenty feet equivalent units (TEUs) of container cargo belonging to food majors PepsiCo India and Emami Agrotech Ltd from Kolkata to Patna’s Gaighat IWT terminal through river Ganga next week will mark a landmark in the country’s inland water transport sector, said the release.
Inland Waterways Authority of India’s (IWAI) vessel MV RN Tagore, which sailed from Kolkata’s Garden Reach jetty on Thursday with cargo from PepsiCo and Emami Agrotech, will reach the IWT terminal in Patna in 6-7 days after an 815-km long voyage on river Ganga (National Waterway-1).
The cargo will be unloaded at IWAI’s inter-modal terminal at Gaighat in Patna from where onward cargo will be loaded. Earlier, on November 12, 2018, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had received the country’s first IWT containerised cargo that reached Varanasi from Kolkata.