Opinion (Spotlight Weekly)

Advantages Of Kosi Canal Waterway

By A.B. THAPA

Water transportation has several inherent advantages. Its greatest attraction is the low operation cost. The coefficient of friction in water is very small. One horsepower can pull 4,000 kg on water while on road and rail, it can move only 150 kg and 500 kg respectively.

Apart from being a very cheap mode of transportation, inland water transportation is the safest and the most reliable form of movement, with very low risks of pilferage, loss and damage of goods. Such transportation is very convenient for moving big and heavy goods and equipment. Among the other obvious advantages of inland water transportation are: (a) ability to open markets for otherwise non-marketable commodities (b) ability to stimulate industrial production (c) ability to attract production facilities to water-oriented locations in the interior of the country and thereby aid in their dispersal from the coastal congested areas, and (d) ability to fit services into production line processes for movement of raw materials.

Access to Sea

Nepal has always been at a great disadvantage because our landlocked status. Free and unhindered access to the sea to facilitate trade and transit has long been a cherished dream of our country. The fulfillment of this dream has remained one of the most important objectives of our international relations. Inland waterway linking the country with the seaport would be ideally suited to relieve our difficulties in handling goods, particularly bulk cargoes in transit. Nepal has been expressing its intention to use the main rivers to establish waterway linkage with the seaport.

There are several impediments to Nepal's plan to develop inland waterway. The most important one is the slow progress in recovery of the Ganges navigation itself, which suffered a terrible setback after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. At present, Ganges navigation is rapidly gaining momentum.

We are holding discussions with India on major storage projects. There could hardly be a more opportune time for us to raise the issue of inland waterways through India to the seaport. We should press ahead with our plans to establish such a link.

Recent Examples in Europe

The Kosi navigation canal will be a component of the Kosi High Dam Project. There are good examples where big multipurpose projects have helped to develop inland navigation. The river Rhine is one. In order to improve navigation and to produce hydroelectric energy, France, by the Treaty of Versailles, diverted the Rhine's water below Basel into a canal that joins the Rhine at Neu Breisach. This helped to significantly improve the navigation conditions, permitting barges of 1,500 tons capacity to ply in that stretch of the river.

A massive Danube Waterway Improvement Program with 12 low dams was launched in the post-war period. It is almost at the final stage of completion. The whole of the Austrian reach of the Danube, more than 350 km in length would be navigable for very large vessels.

Another recent example is that of Main-Danube Canal in Germany. The construction of the 171-km canal was completed in the 1990s. The canal winds through some of the most challenging, scenic, and environmentally sensitive landscapes in Germany. The Altmuhl Valley traversed by the canal is one of the most beautiful and environmentally fragile in Bavaria. It is this factor that lies behind the long and often passionate opposition to this project. However, Germany did not bow before the environmentalists opposing the canal scheme who regarded that it would be the end of the Altmuhl valley. The economic attraction of the waterway for Germany was too great.

According to a study conducted on behalf of the State Railway, moving one ton of goods in Germany costs 14 pfenings (about 9 cents) per kilometer by rail and 29 pfenings by road, but just 4 pfenings by inland waterway.

Stair step locks on the Main River lift barge traffic to Bamburg, northern entry point to the canal. From there, 11 locks raise ships to the highest point on any commercial waterway in Europe, to about 180 m above Bamburg. Five more locks then lower vessels to Kelheim, on the southern terminus of the canal. The waterway will accommodate huge Euro-barges carrying up to 2,425 tons of bulk cargo, the equivalent of 78 truck trailers.

The 1997 Kosi Study Agreement

Though we were very slow to realize the significance, the 1997 Kosi study agreement greatly helped to fill the wide gap that existed in the perceptions of Nepal and India on Kosi development. India agreed to bear the entire cost to carry out a detailed feasibility study of the Sunkosi dam project to provide irrigation and power benefits almost entirely to Nepal. In the field of inland waterway, both countries could go a step further at the request of the Nepalese side. India agreed to bear the entire cost of feasibility study of a navigation canal linking Nepal with the Ganges.

An effort is made here to show how an economically viable navigation canal presented in the concept paper of the Water and Energy Commission Secretariat would be preferable to the natural course of the Kosi for navigation.

Advantages of Canal Navigation

The Kosi Waterway is the nearest to the Calcutta Seaport and is well linked with the transportation system within Nepal. That justifies granting priority to develop this waterway. Unfortunately, the topography of the terrain in India traversed by the Kosi River is quite steep. There is an elevation drop of about 40 meters between the Indo-Nepal border and the Ganges River in a north south stretch of just about 120 km. This makes the task of developing the Kosi River channel suitable for navigation by large vessels very difficult. The high topographical gradient makes the channel depth small, due to high flow velocities. All these difficulties can be easily overcome if we choose to have a navigation canal instead of a natural course of the Kosi River.

There are obvious advantages of a navigable canal linking Chatra with Kursella, where the Kosi merges with the Ganges. The navigation canal would follow the shortest route to the Ganges River. The length of the Kosi navigation canal from the Indo-Nepal border near Birpur to the Ganges is expected to be only about 120 km, whereas the length of the river route to cover the same stretch would have been about 270 km.

The entry point of the Kosi navigation canal into the Ganges River is near the tail end of the Ganges, where the depth and widths of the river channel are expected to be adequate for relatively big vessels. There might even be significant enhancement in navigability of the Ganges River near the tail end due to backwater rises after the completion of the Farakka Barrage. The Kosi navigation canal that would take in vessels plying in the lower reach of the Ganges would be far bigger in size than any such canal along the Gandak or Karnali rivers falling into the upper reach of the Ganges.

Dimensions of Canal and Locks

The operation cost of the river transportation is dependent on the allowable size of the vessels plying on the waterway. So our efforts must be to plan the Kosi canal waterway in a way that would be suitable for river crafts as big as possible.† The 165-km long Kosi canal - out of which about 120 km would be in India - should be planned for operation on a par with the Farakka barrage and canal. The size of the Farakka lock is 25 .15 meters wide and 180.7 meters long, whereas the minimum operating depth is about three meters. The same dimensions should be applied to the Kosi navigation canal. The proposed navigable depth would be comparable to such depths prevailing in the United States and Europe.

The United States had about 25,000 miles of internal commercial navigable channels in 1968, of which 15,000 miles provided operating depths of nine feet or more. The nine-foot draft is considered standard for barge and towing industry operations in the United States. In 1966, about 490 million tons of freight was carried by all kinds of river ships.

A Unified European Network was agreed with regard to the whole of Europe that category IV waterways should be the standard link between river basins. This category should be able to accommodate 1,350-1,500 ton vessels. The locks should have a minimum depth of 3.5 m over the sill.

The Narmada Valley Development Authority has also planned to build a navigation canal. The canal is intended to be used for navigation as well as for irrigation. The Narmada Canal has a bed width of 78.8 m. The side slope is 1.2 m. The water depth at low water is 3.8 m. The water depth at high water would be 7.6 m. The push barge convey plying on the Narmada canal would be 170 m long, 15 m wide, draught loaded 3.0 m and draught empty 0.5 m. The design speed at low water would be 9 km/hr relative to canal current.

Navigation Beyond India

Development of deep waterway after the introduction of the Kosi navigation canal could help to opening up possibilities far beyond our wildest dreams. A recent study by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific has recommended the introduction of Cargo River Coasters (CRCs) along the Ganges corridor for the transportation of food grains from Patna to the southern coastal areas. It implies that after the development of Kosi canal navigation, Nepal could also look forward to extending navigation services far beyond Calcutta and Haldia ports to destinations like Dhaka and Mumbai.