The West Kochi Passengers’ Association has filed a petition to the Chief Minister’s Office, appealing to the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on the long delay by the Irriga, tskons chastising the Irrigation department for the long and unreasonable delay in dredging the active port area of the Jetty Mattancherry, due to which, the ferries from Mainland Kochi have been unable to reach the Jetty since 2018.
Ferries from mainland Kochi could have resumed operations to Mattancherry years ago but for the ‘apathy and indifference’ on the part of the Irrigation department in performing dredging of the jetty that has been refurbished lately. In this regard, the plans for re-opening the ferry services in the densely populated area have been obstructed by the appeals made by M.M.Abbas who is the president of the association.
As for the Irrigation department, they do not even have a deadline for the completion of the dredging works. This raises the question of whether the contractor of the department is simply taking too much time to complete the work so that he can increase the cost of the work. It would have been a sharing or a little bit more defensive strategy for the SWTD that owns the Jetty too. He has alleged that some politicians from the region want to do away with the ferry services at Mattancherry.
The SWTD jetty that is located next to the jetty built for erstwhile Kochi water metro is historic and is also said to be one of the earliest water taxi terminals operating in Kerala. It ensured last mile water connectivity from the region to the mainland. SWTD ferries use to call the jetty up to 2018, till when the so-called flood had caused silting of the channel that approached the jetty, which caused threats to the security of vessels.
Emphasizing this point further and expressing their dissatisfaction with the inability of the SWTD to carry out dredging of the jetty premises for a long time, officials said that they had even earmarked a ferry for operations in this corridor, and even mounted rubber fenders on the jetty complex to safely receive ferries. ‘The dredging works remaining with the Irrigation department must be completed and a notification sent to us concerning the same so that ferries can be allocated to that particular route where there is high demand, because the road route which also has so many bottlenecked bridges is very long and choked.
The Mattancherry Water Metro Action Council too has been fighting with tarmac potholes and more importantly for the dredging of the channel to be completed. It explained how for the past seven years, residents, traders, and tourists have had to disembark from ferries at the Customs Jetty in Fort Kochi and either walk or hire autos to get to Mattancherry. Apart from this, the delay also stalled the flow of tourists to Mattancherry permanently, it stated.
Those In the irrigation department disclosed that the dredging works were contracted out but it was a failure because the deadline of February was set as the new deadline.
