The shipping ministry is restraining the Dredging Corp of India (DCI) from supplying required number of dredgers to Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT) even as draught of the riverine port has come to an alarming level forcing parcel load to come down by an average of 7000 tonne.
KoPT officials alleged that DCI, owing to pressure from the shipping ministry, has deployed all its efficient dredgers to the Sethusamudram project. KoPT chairman Anup Chanda said it was trying to get more dredgers from the DCI to overcome the crisis.
Draught of the Haldia Dock Complex, the main arm of the KoPT, has come down to a level of 7.5 meters at present, around 5 metres low than what it was supposed to be according to the original plan.
RK Burman, secretary of the Haldia Dock Officer?s Forum, said the current 7.5 meters draught was at the best of seasons (monsoon) for a riverine port, whose shipping channels are flood channels and not self-cleansing. This would further fall by around 1 meter in November. KoPT handled 60 million tonne of cargo in 2007-08, the second highest among the 12 Indian major ports. Of that, HDC handled 46m tonne.
Officials felt that the draught constraint would bring HDC to the verge of closure during December, but Chanda said the situation would be taken care of by deploying additional dredgers. He said three maintenance dredgers are deployed at the shipping channels in Haldia at present and ?we expect two more to be deployed?one by the first week of October and another by the first week of November.? ?We have deployed one cutter suction dredger, usually used for capital dredging.? According to members of the HDC Officers Forum, the DCI was supposed to deploy six maintenance dredgers but deployed only 3 old and inefficient ones diverting the rest to Sethusamundaram.
Considering the gravity of situation in Haldia, the DCI should have deployed more dredgers.
In fact, the hue and cry over Haldia was raised in August, when the depth of the Auckland Channel came down from a minimum required of 5.5 mts to 3.9 meters. Draught in Haldia is measured by the depth of this channel plus the tidal rise minus the ships? under kleen clearance.
A ship generally asks for an under kleen clearance (UKC) of 1.2 m so that it does not touch the riverbed. But the draught situation in August could not provide ships the required UKC leading port operations to a standstill.
Chanda as an immediate measure had urged the pilots of ships to navigate the channels with a kleen clearance of 1.1 mts and closed one of the five tracks in the channel. Chanda on Wednesday said the measures being taken were only the remedial ones and very little has been done for actual solution of the problem.
KoPT needs to implement the Rs 936 crore river regulatory scheme (RRS), which would mostly involve capital dredging. But before that the river has to be conditioned for that.
Central Water & Power Research Station (CWPRS) will launch a study to find whether an additional channel could be set up around Auckland and an ?opening for impediments is made.? ?CWPRS will start the study for the much awaited RRS in November,? Chanda said.