GUWAHATI: Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Thursday laid the foundation stone for four river lighthouses on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, the first such infrastructure on an inland waterway in the country.
The Union Minister for Ports, Shipping and Waterways has initiated the process of constructing lighthouses at Bogibeel in Dibrugarh district, Bandu in Kamrup Metropolitan District, Silghat in Nagaon district on the south bank of the river, and Biswanath Ghat in Biswanath on the north bank.
While laying the foundation stone at a function here, Sonowal said that these four lighthouses are located at strategic points along the Brahmaputra River, which is the National Waterway-2 and one of the most important inland freight and passenger corridors of India.
The joint venture expenses will be for all four structures $84 Crores. Each lighthouse will be 20 meters high, with a geographic range of 14 nautical miles and a luminous range of 8-10 nautical miles, and will be entirely powered by solar energy.
Besides navigation infrastructure, each site will contain a museum, amphitheater, cafeteria, children’s play area, souvenir shop and landscaped public spaces, making each lighthouse a tourist attraction as well as a functional marine asset, the minister said.
“A tonne of water-borne cargo costs a fraction of what it takes for road transport, generates a fraction of carbon and frees up our highways for passengers and time-sensitive goods. These lighthouses on the Brahmaputra River are a declaration of intent that India’s rivers are open for business around the clock,” he added.
Sonowal said waterways provide a decisive cost advantage, as transporting a ton of cargo via inland waterways costs about one-third of road transport and half the cost of rail.
“For a region like northeast India, where road infrastructure is constantly under pressure from traffic and terrain, operationalizing Brahmaputra as a large-scale freight corridor is not an option but a necessity,” he added.
The commissioning of river lighthouses on NW-2 is a direct response to a 53 per cent increase in cargo movement on the Brahmaputra Waterway in the financial year 2024-25, as recorded by the Inland Waterways Authority of India, a senior official said.
“Freight traffic on NW-2 has witnessed continuous growth, and the Brahmaputra Corridor is now an integral part of supply chains serving Assam’s tea, coal and fertilizer industries, as well as passenger transport and tourism traffic.
He added: “The new lighthouses will enable safe navigation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, accommodate weather monitoring sensors and provide the necessary navigational infrastructure for the sustainable growth of freight and passenger traffic on the river.”
Each lighthouse is scheduled to be completed within 24 months of contract award, following geotechnical investigation, topographic survey and detailed design.
A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between IWAI and the Directorate General of Lighthouses and Lighthouses in April 2025, covering all four sites.
The sites were officially transferred to DGLL under right-of-use agreements executed in June 2025, after a technical proposal was submitted before the Central Advisory Committee for Aids to Navigation.
DGLL, under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, is the statutory authority responsible for providing aids to navigation across India’s 11,098 km coastline and now inland waterways.
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