Delivery of Kochi Water Metro ferries to skip yet another deadline

Dependence on components from abroad and other States affects rollout of vessels

Even as the State government has fixed July as the deadline to commission the first phase (19 terminals of the total 38 terminals envisaged) of the ₹747-crore Water Metro project, the rollout of the first batch of five ferries from Cochin Shipyard, which was slated for April, will be further delayed by a month or so, it is reliably learnt.

The original deadline of December 2020 had been revised to December 2021, after the project overshot multiple deadlines. This was further postponed to April 2022, after taking into consideration a whole lot of issues, including the reported delay in procuring components that went into the making of the ferries. “That they [components] had to be either imported or sourced from other States, has made matters worse,” sources said.

A naval architect-cum-academic who was involved in the manufacture of innumerable boats and ferries, including those operated by the State Water Transport Department (SWTD) in Kochi, wondered why many materials and components were being sourced from other States. “Boatyards located as close as Aroor are capable of providing many of the components. Water Metro ferries could have been built much faster, had MSMEs within Kerala been roped in to supply components,” he said.

Interestingly, the delay in churning out ferries comes after over a year of the commissioning of the Vyttila-Kakkanad route by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in February 2021.

Official sources said Kochi Metro Rail Limited (KMRL) would need adequate number of ferries (from among the 23 for which orders were placed with the shipyard) to link the 19 terminals that are slated for commissioning in July. “This is because people living in the over a dozen islands that the ferries will connect, are in dire need of a mode of commute to reach locales in the mainland. The entire ecosystem, including trial runs in different corridors, banks on the timely handing over of ferries by the shipyard,” they added.

They hoped that the shipyard would hand over the rest of the four ferries (one from among the first batch of five was handed over to KMRL for trial runs) by May-end. “Trial runs will take yet another month. The pandemic affected the pace of sourcing of many components from Europe and other States. There were also initial hiccups in the construction of the innovative hybrid ferries,” the sources added.