Beginning on August 16, ferry service between India and Sri Lanka will be resumed.
In order to travel the distance of sixty nautical miles between Nagapattinam and Kangesanthurai, the ferry service that will be made available seven days a week will take approximately four hours to complete.
On August 16, ferry service connecting Nagapattinam from Tamil Nadu and Kangesanthurai in the north of Sri Lanka will restart, after an unsuccessful effort to do so the previous year.
Before the Palk Strait, which separates the two nations, became a battlefield over a conflict over the fish harvest, the ferry service, which will be managed by a private company called IndSri Ferry, would re-establish an age-old maritime route that has been treasured for a long time by people from both sides.
It will take around four hours for the ferry service to travel the distance of sixty nautical miles from Nagapattinam to Kangesanthurai, which is a vital port located close to Jaffna, the capital of northern Sri Lanka. This ferry service will be operated seven days a week, and it will provide a more affordable form of transportation for Tamils who reside in both northern and southern Sri Lanka.
The vessel known as the “Sivaganga” will depart from Nagapattinam at eight in the morning in order to arrive at Kankesanthurai at noon. On the other hand, the vessel will depart from Sri Lanka at two in the afternoon in order to arrive at its destination at six in the evening. According to Niranjan Nanthagopan, the Managing Director of IndSri Ferry, the journey will take place every single day of the week, with the exception of the period between November 15 and January 15 owing to the adverse sea conditions.
According to what he shared with DH, the cost of a ticket between Nagapattinam and Kankesanthurai is USD 55 (about Rs 4,650), while the cost of a ticket between Kankesanthurai and Nagapattinam is USD 59 (approximately Rs 5,000) inclusive of taxes.
Due to the fact that ticket prices have been decreased, Nanthagopan expressed the expectation that the ferry service would get a good number of passengers this time around.
He continued by saying,
“We hope that the ferry service is utilized not only by businessmen but also by tourists who are traveling to Sri Lanka.”
Direct flights between Jaffna and Chennai have been announced by Indigo, becoming the second airline in India after Air India to do so. The debut of the ferry service, whose costs are lower than flight tickets, comes at the same time as Indigo has announced the start of the ferry service.
There is a contradiction between the expanded people-to-people relations between the two nations, which have shared cultural and civilizational linkages, and the war that is being waged by fishermen from Tamil Nadu, who are routinely imprisoned by the Sri Lankan Navy for crossing into its seas.
According to Indian fishermen, they exclusively fish in the waters of the Palk Straits, which are believed to be environmentally detrimental. However, their counterparts in the northern region of Sri Lanka claim that the issue is not their Indian brothers crossing the border, but rather the fishing equipment, namely bottom trawlers, which are an ecologically destructive activity.
After a hiatus of forty-one years, the ferry service that had been operating between the two ports was restarted in October of 2023. Despite this, the Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) immediately halted it for a number of reasons, one of which being the absence of a ferry that was reserved just for the expedition.
Up until the time that the civil war broke out in Sri Lanka in 1982, India and Sri Lanka were connected via the sea route through the Boat Mail express. This express took passengers by train from Chennai to Dhanuskodi, from which they were transported by steam ferry to Talaimannar, which is located in the northern part of Sri Lanka, and then the passengers were transported by another train to Colombo.
A ferry service between Thoothukudi and Colombo was attempted to be launched in 2011 by the government that was in power at the time, the UPA-II. However, the experiment was unsuccessful since it could not endure for more than five months.