Calcutta, Oct. 28: Calcutta Port Trust today approved the creation of a new shipping channel in the Hooghly, hoping to infuse new life into the slit-choked Haldia port.

The waterway, tentatively called Eden Channel, will have a draft — allowable depth of a ship’s keel under water — of around 8 metres. In the existing Auckland channel, the draft has gone down to 6.7 metres, severely restricting ship movement.

The port trust will now have to pick a firm to remove silt from a stretch 1,200 meters in length and 200 metres in width to open up the new channel. It intends to do the job within a month.

“We hope to open the channel by March,” port trust chairman Anindya Mazumder said.

The channel can be cleared only when the weather is fair, which is between November and March.

However, the pilots, who help foreign ships navigate through the meandering and treacherous Hooghly, have reservations about the proposed new route to the port’s revival.

The Calcutta Hooghly Pilot Guild feels it is an untested course and nothing can be said about it with certainty.

Mazumder promised to refer the pilots’ views to a technical committee.

Rapid silting in the Auckland channel in the past two months has forced the port trust to act fast.

The average draft in the Auckland channel has gone down from 7.6 metres to 6.7 metres in the space of less than two months. It means ships with capacity to carry 55,000 tonnes can only sail with around 20,000 tonnes to Haldia.

If the new move works, it will bring relief to industry, which had feared an escalation of costs in the event of the Haldia port becoming inaccessible. A port coming up in Orissa’s Dhamra has further compounded Haldia’s plight. Dhamra can give users an at least $5-a-tonne advantage over Haldia in terms of ocean freight because it would be able to handle ships that are thrice as big as those sailing to Haldia, shipping circles said.