By IANS,
Kolkata: West Bengal plans to outsource the service of checking the condition of the boats plying in the Sunderbans and Ganga Sagar areas of the state, a minister said.
“We have strength of two engineers only. We need to register and survey those boats which run in Sunderbans region and during the Ganga Sagar region. Our estimate is there are 8,000 unregistered boats. It may be more than that also,” Minister of Inland Waterways Hyder Aziz Safwi said at the sidelines of a seminar of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry here.
“Even if we fill up the two vacancies of the survey engineers, I cannot cover every boat. So we were thinking of outsourcing this service,” he added.
In the last few years, there have been numerous incidents of unregistered boats capsizing in the Ganga Sagar region, killing many people.
Safwi also pointed out that inland waterway can be cheaper for ferrying cargo goods but money has to be invested in building heavy barrages, cargo terminals and jetties.