Guwahati, March 29: The Centre has identified 13 inland waterways from the Northeast to be declared national waterways.

Of the 13, seven are in Assam and the rest are in Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya.

Sources said this is inclusive of the 101 additional inland waterways to be declared national waterways for navigation in the country.

The Centre has approved the proposal to enact legislation to declare 101 inland waterways national waterways.

The minister for shipping and road transport and highways, Nitin Gadkari, said recently that it would take a long time to declare all the identified waterways as national waterways.

One way of reducing this time is to declare all the identified waterways as national waterways through one legislation and enable the government to undertake development measures as and when the need arises and the preparatory work and funding a tie-up is complete.

Sources in the Inland Waterways Authority of India in the Northeast said though the intent looks good, no work has been done to find out what kind of trade can take place on these waterways.

'A thorough study needs to be done as what kind of cargo can go, if any. Otherwise, it will be a futile exercise,' the source said.

The source said the Barak river has still not been declared a national waterway despite all formalities and is still awaiting the approval of Parliament.

The Northeast has one national waterway - the Brahmaputra (National Waterway 2) - which was declared one in 1988 and has carried 2,475,349 metric tonnes of cargo in 2013-14.

Bamboo, bamboo products, cement, building material, fertiliser, foodgrain, milk and other essential commodities have been moved on the national waterway.

The DoNER ministry had said in a report on status of National Waterway 2 last year that the Inland Waterways Authority of India has two to three cargo vessels for demonstrative voyages only.

The inland water transport directorate, Assam, also has some cargo vessels but are now virtually 'defunct', it said.

It said private operators consider investment in vessels on National Waterway 2 too risky, because of uncertainties surrounding the Indo-Bangladesh Trade and Transit Protocol.

'As multi-modal transport planning is yet to take off in the Northeast, the full potential of inland water transport has not been leveraged,' it said.

It added that as inland water transport has not received due importance in policy and investments so far, operators with the required fleet size of vessels have not emerged either in the private or in public sectors.

'This is the major bottleneck in the promotion of inland water transport. The Brahmaputra and Barak rivers have not been fully commercially exploited for transportation purposes,' it said.