The barge sails from Badarpur on Saturday. Telegraph picture

Guwahati, Aug. 11: Star Cement Meghalaya Limited has become the first Indian company to use a river route to export clinker to Bangladesh.

The home grown cement brand, a subsidiary of Cement Manufacturing Company Limited, is using the water route under the India-Bangladesh Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade to export the consignment from its plant in Meghalaya to Bangladesh.

Clinker — lumps of limestone made by processing limestone with other minerals like clay or gypsum — is used as a raw material for cement.

The consignment of 455 tonnes of clinker was sent from Badarpur in Karimganj district of Assam, which is 100km from the plant at Lumshnong in Meghalaya. It will take four days to reach Bangladesh. “One barge sailed yesterday and more will be going in the coming days. The company is aiming to export over 50,000 tonnes of clinker to Bangladesh every month using the river route,” Star Cement president (sales and marketing) Jyoti Swaroop Agarwal told The Telegraph.

“Exporting clinker to Bangladesh by the river route will give us an edge over manufacturers in Southeast Asian countries, who, incidentally, cater to 99 per cent of the clinker requirement of that country,” Agarwal said.

Both India and Bangladesh are taking a number of steps to make the water route more effective.

In fact, the Centre wants the existing India-Bangladesh Protocol to be extended for at least 20 years to provide stability to the trading environment. This will also promote public-private partnerships in the development, management and operation of inland water transport in the Northeast.

In Bangladesh, the annual demand of clinker is about 10 million tonnes (mostly imported) because of the non-availability of raw materials like limestone.

“We believe this mode of logistics will definitely be more commercially viable,” Agarwal said.

Last year, the company had exported clinker to Bangladesh by road.

The company has already tied up with many leading cement manufacturers in the neighbouring country with an eye on fulfilling their long-term clinker requirements and more deals are in the pipeline.

It has two clinker plants, including a 5,300-tonne per day (TPD) unit, at Lumshnong in Meghalaya’s Jaintia hills with a combined annual production capacity of 2.5 million tonnes.

Star Cement, which has a more than 20 per cent stake in the Northeast market, has recently commissioned new cement plants in Jaintia hills in Meghalaya and Guwahati. With these additions, the annual cement production capacity of the company has gone up to 4 million tonnes.