1. Government of India has given priority to the development of National Waterways with the objective of making them a robust and sustainable mode of transportation. Globally, Inland Water Transport (IWT) has long been recognized as a viable mode of transport with many advantages over other modes of surface transport viz. road and railways, especially for bulk goods, over dimensional cargo and hazardous goods. Inland Waterway is considered to be the most environment friendly mode of transportation with its excellent fuel efficiency and lower emission levels.  It can provide high capacity transport corridors along with rail and road.

2. There are 5 declared National Waterways in India (NW-1, NW-2, NW-3, NW-4 and NW-5) and an additional 101 rivers, canals etc., have been identified to be declared as National Waterway. Government of India has recently announced the prestigious project of “Jal Marg Vikas” which is focused on the capacity augmentation for navigation of 1500-2000 ton vessels on National Waterway-1 (NW-1) between Haldia and Allahabad. This shall be achieved by developing and improving the navigational infrastructure and maintaining least available depth (3.0 m) throughout the year in the waterway in the river Ganga between Haldia and Varanasi in phase-I.

3. In order to develop inland water transport as a supplementary mode for transportation of coal on the National Waterway – 1 (Ganga), Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) has entered into MoU with NTPC for transportation of 3 MMTPA of imported coal for a period of 10 years for their plant located at Barh, Patna in the State of Bihar through private sector participation.

4. IWAI proposes to convene a stakeholder’s consultation meeting tentatively in the first week of September 2015, which is open for all the stakeholders / prospective bidders to obtain their feedback/facilitation required for implementation of the project through private sector participation. The objective of the meeting is to collate stakeholders / prospective bidder’s suggestions / facilitation / interventions required so that same could be considered for suitable incorporation in the tender document.

5. The brief of the project, scope of work of Operator and Obligations of IWAI & NTPC is provided in Annex-I. Companies which are interested in participation are requested to send their confirmations to  iwainoi@nic.in, sahamanaskr@yahoo.co.in and also fax at 91-120-2543973.

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