Odisha is missing on both seaplane and cruise services, which are though becoming popular among tourists. The Government of India is promoting both the sea ventures in a big way as tourists are taking a lot of interest in it.
While Odisha has a 480-kilometer-long coastline, there is hardly any interest for sea flight and cruise services, for which other coastal States are grabbing the opportunities. Take for example, Union Minister Ports, Shipping & Waterways Mansukh Mandaviya flagged off a cruise service from the Hazira Port of Surat to Diu on March 31. Mandaviya said development of cruise tourism is now the prime focus of the Government of India. As the Indian coastline has a huge potential for the cruise tourism industry and six international cruise terminals are being planned on the West Coast, Mumbai-Goa-Kochi and East Coast, Visakhapatnam-Kolkata-Chennai regions. While Odisha has three major ports at Gopalpur, Paradip and Dhamra, lack of interest has resulted in the Government of India missing these ports for inclusion in cruise tourism.
The Minister said that before 2014, there were 139 cruise calls at the Indian ports, but today there are 450 cruise calls in the country despite the Covid-19 pandemic. There has been a steady growth in the number of tourists travelling by cruise services since 2014. The number before 2014 was one lakh and the number of tourists in 2019-20 was 4.5 lakh, informed Mandaviya. He expressed optimism about the development of ferry, RoRo and ROPAX services between south Gujarat and Saurashtra region of Gujarat.
He said that water transportation is the new future of transportation with state-of-the-art ferry terminals and modern facilities in the cruise services. One-side voyage time of the cruise service is approximately 13 to 14 hours.
A cruise has the capacity of 300 passengers and has 16 cabins. This cruise will sail two round trips in a week. The cruise has a gaming lounge, a VIP lounge, entertainment on deck and other modern amenities. A one-side journey will cost Rs 900+taxes per head.
In November, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated the Hazira-Ghogha RoPAX service; and within four months, one lakh passengers and thousands of vehicles utilised the ferry service to save journey time and the cost to travel from Hazira (Surat) to Ghogha (Bhavanagar).The success of the ferry service has opened the gates for many more routes of water transportation in Gujarat and all over India, said Mandaviya.
