Rs 350 Crore Plan For Hooghy River Draught Cleared

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has approved a Rs 350.84 crore proposal for the execution of river regulatory measures to improve the draught of Hooghly river over 18 months.

Poor draught of the Hooghly river basin had been acting as a severe impediment to the commercial traffic thereby affecting the Calcutta Port Trust's revenues, sources said.

In view of the huge dredging costs involved in maintaining the depth in the Hooghly river, the CPT authorities recently took up their long-standing demand on this issue with the union shipping minister Ved Prakash Goyal.

The project is expected to improve the navigational depth of Hooghly river from 8.5 metres to 9.5 metres enabling large ships entering the port, reduce dredging costs substantially, increase commercial traffic by about 3.89 million tonne and put a brake on the deteriorating trend in river morphology.

The components of the Hooghly project include capital dredging over Jiggerkhali Flat (Rs 263.83 crore), construction of southern guide wall of 12 kilometres at the western side of Nayachandra island (Rs 41.10 crore), trimming of eastern side of Haldia Channel (Rs 26.53 crore), bank protection near Sondia column (Rs 16.64 crore).

As a consequence of the implementation of the project, which is expected to result in increased traffic and incremental revenues for the CPT, the union government is also expected to save more than Rs 100 crore on account of reduction in annual non-plan subsidy allocations.