Kochi Water Metro project will be launched by Prime Minister in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday

The culmination of work that started as early as 2014 is the $747 billion Kochi Water Metro project, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi will unveil in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday.

As a canal extension of Kochi Metro, the project calls for 78 air-conditioned electric ferries in the Greater Kochi region. Cochin Shipyard has delivered nine of the 23 100-passenger-capable boats that Kochi Metro Rail Ltd (KMRL) ordered, with the remaining nine anticipated to arrive by year's end. It is anticipated that another 55 ferries with a capacity of 50 passengers will operate in similarly shallow waterbodies.

Elias George, a former managing director of the KMRL and a naval architect who graduated from CUSAT and later served as the Additional Chief Secretary, is credited with coming up with the idea for the water-transport project, according to Dileep Krishnan, former head of the Department of Ship Technology at Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT).

He claims the intention was to give commuters from West Kochi, Vypeen, and Willingdon Island—which are home to a few lakh people but are not connected by Kochi Metro—a metro-rail-like experience.

Thanks to the KMRL's insistence on a number of aspects, including aesthetics that are comparable to the metro, the Water Metro ferries will aid in population integration and offer the same level of trip quality and safety as the metro rail. There has never been a travel inclusivity initiative like this in India.

With the help of this goal, the project was transformed from a smaller-scale water transportation project for Kochi under the JNNURM initiative of the Central government into a massive undertaking that would connect areas of mainland Kochi with ten islands in the backwaters.