An amphibious bus, which can operate both on water and road, is facing a major roadblock after it landed in Mumbai nearly a month back. While the bus-cum-vessel imported by Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust costs around Rs 3 crore, customs department has raised 223% import duty thereby pushing the final price to nearly Rs 9.2 crore.
The bus has been standing idle since it was imported from Sweden to operate at the Mumbai port. Government sources said the high cost of the bus is because of its categorisation for calculating the import duty. While the import duty on a vessel is around 40%, it’s as high as 223% for a fully built vehicle. They said high cost of import duty will make the entire initiative financially unviable.
Now the shipping ministry has approached finance ministry to waive off the entire import duty so that the vessel can start operating soon.
In a letter addressed to finance minister Arun Jaitley, shipping minister Nitin Gadkari has mentioned that the bus has been imported by JNPT, for promoting tourism and water transport. Gadkari has also said the initiative has been taken by the port trust under its CSR activities.
Shipping ministry officials said “The port trust was under the impression that the amphibious bus is a vessel since it plies on water. “Since it will be used for both plying a few kilometres on Marine Drive and on sea only for tourism purpose by a government agency, we expect the finance ministry will consider the case to waive off the import duty,” a source said. Officials also said that the main intention behind introducing an amphibious bus is to push acceptance of people to look at waterways as a new mode of transport to reduce congestion on road and railways. Mumbai is one of the cities that faces daily traffic nightmare on its roads because of growing number of vehicles. Even the rail network is over-burdened.[/vc_column_text]
