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.

“We can maintain a draft of two and half to three meters as in the Mississippi river inland waterways. Indian river waterways can be operational all round the year unlike in the US where they remain closed for some time during a year,” Gadkari said.

In the context of inland waterways in India, he said the ability to move more cargo per shipment will make the barge transport both fuel efficient as well as environmentally advantageous.

Carbon dioxide emissions from water transportation will be much less as compared with rail transportation, he added.

The minister further said that barges when built in India, will help the movement of large quantities of bulk commodities and raw material like coal, petroleum, stones, sand and gravels used in road and highway building as well as food grains at relatively low cost.