In my line of work, which is worrying about trucks and their business, we come across quite a bit of studies and charts showing various metrics regarding the various modes of transport. And in every chart, there is polite lip service done to waterways transport. It almost seems like unkindness not to include it on the chart, yet the unspoken understanding is that waterways transport does not amount to much.
Which set me thinking: Why is it so in a country with such a big coastline and so many rivers and canals that waterways have been ignored?
Waterways are a boon for transporting pretty much anything, because the energy required to push a loaded boat through water at slow speeds is much lesser than what is needed to push the same mass on land. Yeah, the speeds are slower, much slower, but for a country obsessed with asking “average kya hai?” about any and every vehicle including Rolls Royces, where roads were designed for bullock carts and stayed that way, and low operating cost and slow speed should have been a killer combo. And the technology is not so complicated either. Boat and ship making are pretty much established sciences that have steadily trotted along with the times, and if you have access to diesel engines and some knowledge of gearboxes and propellers, you are pretty much on your way to a nice efficient boat system.
The British did realize this, and did their bit to build canals and ports wherever possible, they also had good ferry systems wherever they put their minds to it. Case in point, Kolkata and the Hoogly river. (The Portuguese also left behind a system of ferries to navigate the river systems in Goa.) And while on Goa, iron ore from Goa and Karnataka is carried down the Mandovi and the Zuari in barges. They carry the ore some distance out to sea, where it is loaded into ships for export. And like everything else the Brits did, it all worked well even after they left. For some time. There was the Buckingham canal, to name one, that was a jolly good ride till the 60s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Canal
There were ferries on the Ganga too. But somewhere along the way, the Indian administration dropped the ball. All the attention in the first three decades of independence went into heavy industries, roads and rail. And waterways were neglected. The B’ ham canal along the Andhra coast right up to Chennai was never allowed to recover from the cyclones in the 60s.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2002/09/23/stories/2002092300130300.htm
All that canal and river navigation would require would be some construction work to build proper jetties and ghats, and a unit to make and maintain boats. Most rivers in north India are perennial, and there is also a network of canals criss crossing the landscape. For the stretches on the river and canal bank, a ferry system would have been an easy to operate, cheap system of transport. At least, it would not have been more complicated than maintaining and running trains and rickety buses on bad roads. Yeah, there was the need to periodically desilt the waterways, but then, river silt makes for very fertile top soil. Any farmer would have welcomed a load of silt in his field from time to time. Or it could as well be used for construction anywhere. In fact, Salt Lake, Kolkata is built on silt from the Hoogly.
And then, there is the long coastline of India. we have built sand castles, admired sunrises and sunsets, made salt and revolutions, built legal and illegal structures, built ports, gone fishing….. except make use of all the free water to run ships all along the coast. Ships could easily carry everything that did not need to be pretty quick (which includes everything in this country except VIP motorcades). For the west coast, denied a decent road and rail network till recently, it could have been the most obvious, and the cheapest alternative. Instead, we built roads up and down mountains, tunneled long tunnels for the Konkan rail, and basically stretched the travelling time from Mumbai to Trivandrum into a three day train journey.
Why?
Its just a hunch, but could it be that the capital was New Delhi, do far away from the coast, that the sea was never in the immediate consciousness of the babudom that made policy decisions? Well, they did make half hearted attempts to develop inland navigation, but never quite got it right. And the states never got it right, because, dependent as they were for hand outs from the Maai Baap in Delhi, they missed out on grants for coastal navigation and inland water development?
Could it also be that the boat has always been something in the hands of the lowly fisherman, and the high brow Bhadralok who made it to babudom, didn’t have the humble boat in their consciousness either?
Or maybe the scope for siphoning funds from road and rail contracts was so much more lucrative than from building vessels and desilting.
Anyway, a paper on the operational difficulties of coastal cum river vessels is here:
