KOCHI: The International Maritime Organization (IMO), one of the UN wings that regulates international shipping and the apex body enforcing International Maritime law, visited Kochi Water Metro on Monday.
“The purpose of our visit is to learn about the impressive achievement of Kerala in terms of the water metro, a pioneering initiative in sustainable urban water transport and show others across the world that it is possible to have commercial viability, environmental sustainability and societal impact through such services,” said IMO department of partnership and projects chief Jose Mathieckal. The officials’ visit comes as part of Green Voyage 2050, a partnership project between the Government of Norway and IMO launched in May 2019 that aims to transform the shipping industry towards a lower carbon future.
“India is selected as one of the lead countries in the project along with China, Malaysia, South Africa and Georgia.
We are looking at the demonstration of green solutions in water transportation. We are in India to set up a sustainable transportation in Assam, and we realised that Kerala initiated its journey into the same. Hence, we decided to see how the Kochi Water Metro is planning to implement the project,” said Mathieckal. The IMO officials took the trial run in the water metro on High Court to Vypeen route.
“We hope that the water metro service will be extended to other parts of the state as well,” he said.The IMO officials said without decarbonising the maritime sector, it would be difficult to meet the Paris goal for India. “There was an IMO ballast water convention which created a market of 50 billion for technology and India missed out in capturing the market,” he said.
KMRL managing director Loknath Behera said Kochi Metro is expected to run entirely on solar energy by 2024.
“KMRL and water metro will run on solar energy by 2024. The metro rail requires 20MW of energy and we are already generating 12MW through solar plants. The government is now planning to hand over land to us to generate the remaining 8MW. The water metro requires an additional 6MW of energy which will be added on later,” said Behera.