IWAI Starts India’s First River Ship-Repair Centre at Ramnagar Port

The Inland Waterways Authority of India began construction on Saturday, 12 September 2026, of what it frames as India’s first river-based ship-repair centre, at the northern end of Ramnagar port in Varanasi. The site covers about four bigha. Larsen & Toubro Geostructure is the executing agency. Staff have already started preliminary work on the ground.

Chief engineer Ramesh Joshi said the project is to be completed in two years. The team had waited for the rains to ease, he said, but started early to finish sooner. That is the on-record timeline. No political framing attaches to this civic-infrastructure copy; the locked story is an IWAI project start on the Ganga inland stretch.

Until now, vessels working this stretch have had to go to Kolkata for repair. A dedicated river yard at Ramnagar is meant to cut that detour. Sea-coast yards have been the norm for ship repair in India; a centre built on a river inland is the claim IWAI is putting on this site. The distinction matters for operators who move cargo and passenger craft on National Waterway stretches rather than coastal routes.

The plan includes a water channel cut at the northern end so vessels can leave the main stream for repair. A platform for the repair facility is under construction. Some ships will be lifted by crane onto a dry dock. Faults above the waterline can be fixed while the vessel remains in the river. Those are the engineering outlines locked for this file — not a finished yard, not a launch ceremony with invented speeches.

IWAI is also advancing a freight village at the port complex. The repair centre and the freight village sit as parallel inland-waterway pushes on the same Ramnagar map. Readers should not collapse them into one project; Saturday’s stamp is the repair-centre construction start on roughly four bigha at the north end.

Hand-over after construction is stated to go to the executing agency. That is how the project brief reads at the start line. What the yard will charge, which vessel classes it will take first, and how the crane dry-dock queue will run are later operational questions. This desk locks the start, the agency, the chief engineer’s two-year target, and the channel-and-platform design outline.

For boat and barge operators on the Varanasi–Ramnagar waterfront, the practical near-term change is still limited: scaffolding and earthwork, not an open repair bay. The longer-term change, if the two-year clock holds, is a local place to fix hull and above-water faults without a Kolkata run. That is the economic logic IWAI is selling with the first-on-a-river framing.

Ramnagar port already anchors inland cargo and passenger movement on this bend of the Ganga. Adding repair capacity at the north end is an attempt to keep more of that fleet’s maintenance cycle inside the same geography. Preliminary work by L&T Geostructure staff is the visible proof that the Saturday start is not a paper announcement alone.

This file stays inside the project brief. No cost figure beyond the site size and agency name is locked here. No completion ribbon is promised before the two-year window Joshi named. Construction has begun on about four bigha at the north end of Ramnagar port, with a channel planned off the main stream, a platform rising, and a crane dry-dock route for some vessels — India’s first river ship-repair centre as framed by IWAI, now on the ground.