Gadkari tours Mississippi’s famous inland waterways system

TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi-Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari took a study tour of the famous inland waterways system on the Mississippi river in the US, as his ministry gears up for a similar transportation network on rivers such as the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Mahanadi. The inland waterways system on the Mississippi river has 40,000 km of navigable water covering almost the entire North America and is considered one of the world’s most commercially viable inland waterways systems.

The minister toured the system yesterday and studied its structure as well as exchanged views on land port operations with St. Louis Port authorities, the Shipping Ministry said in a statement today.  He discussed the feasibility of similar arrangements in making the Ganga river waterways navigable in an effective and commercially viable manner, it added. Gadkari examined the towboats pushing barges lashed together to form a big tow as an extremely efficient mode of transportation, moving about 22,500 tonnes of cargo as a single unit.

A single 15-barge tow is equivalent to about 225 railroad cars or 870 tractor-trailer trucks. If the cargo transported on Mississippi inland waterways each year had to be moved by another mode, it would take an additional 6.3 million rail cars or 25.2 million trucks to carry the load, the officials told Gadkari. The minister said that like in the US, central government will manage the inland waterways in India.