Stating simple facts.Mumbai(sweet old Bombay) made up of 7 odd islands gifted as dowry to a daughter by a loving father.
7 odd islands - Defn. of island- land mass surrounded by water from all sides.
Looking at the current state of the overburdened public transportation system existing in Mumbai doesn’t it seem more natural to provide for some new means to share the existing burden and ease it off. Well the first thing that one could think of(being an island city) is venturing out and exploring the possibilty of a water as a means of transport. The same thing occured to our Transportation Department also. Kudos to them to atleast think of this!
Transportation experts have been demanding sea transport systems since the 1960s. In the 1990s, an attempt was made to run a hovercraft service between Gateway of India and Navi Mumbai, which is on the mainland, but it was shut down due to poor commuter response. But then we should also look at the infrastructure/ population explosion then and now.
In 2000 odd talks again started for a Water transport system in Mumbai and it was called the IPWT(Inland Passenger Water Transport) .
The complete details of this project are available at https://msrdc.org/projects/PWT.html but the details only date back till 2006. What has been the progress after that?
On this site they have provided an email id for any queries/feedback - Well you guessed it right - send an email to this id and it obviously bounces -(User does not exist).
This is what the Budget Speech of Maharshtra State Govt. has to say about the above
https://finance.mah.nic.in/speech2005/speech9.htm. In this they mention that a LOI(Letter of Intent) has been given to the Developer on BOT(Build, Operate, Transfer) basis while according to M/S Satyagrahi Shipping Co. Ltd they have been only issued a CLOI(Conditional Letter of Intent) which states that only after the Developers submit all the required paper work can the LOI be issued. But then thats the end of the road(or may I say End of water(sic).
Is there anyone who is answerable for this? We Bombayites are the ones who suffer coz of this apathy of the Govt.