With aim to facilitate shippers and cargo owners with real time data on availability of vessels, the Inland Waterways Authority (IWAI) of India has launched a dedicated portal, e-connect.

Named as the Forum of Cargo-Owners And Logistics-Operators (FOCAL), the link of the portal is available on the homepage of IWAI website www.iwai.nic.in.

This e-connect measure will enable direct interaction among the vessel operators, shippers and cargo owners as currently, there is no platform to know the availability of vessels in the market.

The IWAI in a statement released on Wednesday said that the portal was launched by Authority’s chairperson Nutan Guha Biswas on Tuesday.

It further added that FOCAL will facilitate responses from the logistic operators against the requirement raised by cargo owners and vice-versa.

According to the statement, the users can register on the portal to key in the availability and details of vessels or the available cargo, as the case may be. Cargo owners will be able to put details like the origin, destination, type of cargo and others.

The government is developing national waterways as a key transport intervention, as part of an integrated transport network strategy, which will help correct the transport modal mix that imposes huge logistics costs on the Indian economy. At present the cost of logistics in India, at 15 per cent of GDP, is about twice those in the United States.