Officials of the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority and the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Corporation blamed each other for the disruption of ferry services on Mawa-Charjanajat and Paturia-Daulatdia routes. The corporation officials said that navigability on the river routes were the main reason for the disruption and the authority failed to dredge the river properly to keep the river routes navigable.
The authority officials, however, claimed that the ferries were running aground as the corporation were operating them overloaded.
The operation of ferries on the about 4-kilometre Paturia-Daulatdia route was restored partially after more than 62-hour suspension on September 2.
At that time, the authority chief engineer (dredging), Abdul Matin, told New Age that they had started dredging the river Padma on the Patutia-Daulatdia route on August 26 but after dredging about 1,100 feet they found it impossible to dredge the river due to strong current.
On September 15, ferry services on Mawa-Charjanajat route were disrupted due to strong currents in the Padma.
The authority superintending engineer (dredging), Rakibul Islam Talukdar, in the past week told New Age that the rivers usually lose navigability due to siltation on riverbeds and the rate of siltation usually became high between mid September and December.
He said that they were regularly dredging the rivers to keep the river routes navigable.
‘Sometimes the ferries of BIWTC are overloaded causing them to run aground,’ he said.
Rakibul said that the ferries of the corporation were built to carry a maximum load of 70 tonnes, while sometimes they were carrying about 450 tonnes.
Another official of the dredging department said that in the present rainy season, they were scheduled to dredge 10 lakh cubic metre of soil, while so far they dredged out 70 thousand cubic metre of soil from different river beds.
The corporation’s control room manager, Abdun Nur, said that 42 ferries of the corporation were carrying vehicles including buses, trucks, cars and even passengers all over the country.
The corporation’s engineering department general manager, Sheikh Md Alamgir Azad, denied the allegation of overloading their ferries.
‘The main problem at these ferry terminals is the lack of navigability. The BIWTA should dredge the river in these areas properly to keep them navigable,’ he said.
He also cited strong current of river Padma as another reason for the disruption of ferry services on the two routes.
-With New Age input
