The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) on Tuesday told the Madras High Court that it could not take up development of the Buckingham Canal since 2015 due to heavy encroachments on the national waterway and that it was up to the State government to clear those encroachments.
Appearing before Chief Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari and Justice D. Bharatha Chakravarthy in a 2014 writ petition, filed by Kasturba and Indira Nagar Residents Welfare Forum, central government senior panel counsel V. Chandrasekharan said the Buckingham Canal was a part of National Waterway-4 (NW-4).
He told the Bench that NW-4 runs 1,078 km-long, covering several canals in the Kakinada (in Andhra Pradesh)-Puducherry stretch. In 2009, IWAI decided to exclude 50 km stretch of the Buckingham Canal between Ennore South and Muttukadu in Tamil Nadu from being developed as a national waterway.
