The country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki will soon start its pilot project for transporting vehicles via inland waterways. This will help the company reduce its transportation cost by almost a half of what it costs by road. To enable transportation of cars through inland vessels, Maruti Suzuki has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI). Since earlier this year, Hyundai had been successfully transporting its cars through the coastal waterways.
Though a feasible option, the waterways infrastructure in the country has not been developed yet to enable its optimum utilisation. Other Asian countries like China and Korea have been utilising their waterways more than 40 per cent, while India has been restricting itself to only about 5 per cent with most freight transport still happening on land. However, this is expected to change soon given the recently passed bill to convert more than 100 rivers in the country into National waterways.
Moving ahead, we can expect to see more automakers opting for waterways for transportation of cars. The Indian market being price sensitive in nature, the benefits could likely be passed on to the customers as well. To begin with, reports indicate that IWAI has deployed one vessel at Varanasi to transport the cars from Varanasi to Kolkata through National Waterway-1 on the river Ganga.
