RE:Don't hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus
by Sanjay Singh on Feb 29, 2008 06:15 PM
Dear Mohammed,
I too am a well qualified and well experienced mariner and from the mariners point of view I would tell that the sethu samudram project is not beneficial at all for the development of the country. The gulf of mannar is a very shallow depth area and also very heavy current area. One needs lot of continuous dredging and maintenance to maintain the depth of the channel and such maintenance is not possible in open sea area. You cannot compare sethu samudram channel to Suez canal or panama canal or Kiev canal. All those channels are land based channels. At sethu samudram the depth won't be very much and at present the worldwide shpis are of higher tonnage which requires deep draft for sailing. Such big ships still ply via Colombo port but none of those ships would be able to sail through sethu samudram because of the depth restrictions.
Secondaly, it would be a very expensive affair to maintain the depth of the channel. And all those money would be recovered from the ships using the sethu samudram. So it will be very expensive for the ships to sail through sethu samudram as each time they would have to pay the usage fees which would be minimum Rs 50 Lakh. At Chennai the fees for 7 Km channel is 12 lakhs. At Tuticorin the fees for usage of the channel which is 5 km long is more than 10 lakh Rs. So you can imagine what would be the usage fees at Sethu samudram which is more than 100 KM long channel.
Also if the channel is developed then India will be opened t
