SERV is supporting Swiss exporter’s visionary ropeway project
Bartholet Maschinenbau AG from Flums is building the first urban ropeway in Varanasi. Once the project is complete, it will be able to transport up to 3,000 people every hour. SERV is supporting the forward-looking project by providing pre-shipment risk insurance and buyer credit insurance.
10.03.2025
A large part of the city of Varanasi, in the north of India, is classified as a UNESCO world heritage site; it has in the region of 1.2 million inhabitants and is considered the spiritual capital of India.
Varanasi has been growing continuously for years. The infrastructure, however, is poorly developed, especially for traffic, leading to congestion and environmental pollution. In response, the government of Uttar Pradesh established a mobility concept in 2019 to manage this growth and plan an efficient, environmentally friendly and safe public transport system. This concept is based on the use of urban ropeways to meet the growing demand for transport, especially from tourism.
Commissioning in 2025
Varanasi receives about five million visitors every year, mainly comprising people of faith from India. Bartholet Maschinenbau AG in cooperation with Vishwa Samudra Engineering will make the first sections of the urban ropeway (India) operational for these users in 2025. The ropeway will greatly reduce the travel time between the main station and the Godowlia Chowk temple district, which is one of the most congested routes.
The ropeway project has a total length of 3,660 metres and a maximum capacity of 3,000 passengers per direction per hour. The roughly 150 panoramic cabins (designed by Studio F. A. Porsche), each with ten seats, will connect five stations and travel up to 40 metres above the buildings of Varanasi.
Co-CEO, Bartholet Maschinenbau AG
Challenges of the project
“This project by Bartholet is extraordinary and forward-looking with regard to tourism in India. At the same time, we and the exporter were faced with new challenges owing to its urban setting. Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and one of India’s most fascinating UNESCO world heritage sites. Examining and evaluating environmental and social risks is very important for an infrastructure project of this type: planning a ropeway in a big city impacts the natural environment and communities in a different way to the same project in a mountain area, especially in a city like Varanasi. It was fundamentally important to us to be involved from the start, i.e. right from the first discussions about financing. By doing so, we were able to meticulously review and take into consideration all the factors at an early stage,” explains Andreas Oel, Senior Vice President, Large Enterprises, SMEs & Acquisition.
Daily traffic jams in the world’s major cities are a known issue. Urban ropeways cannot solve the congestion by themselves; however, they do offer some advantages over conventional means of local transport. That’s why the idea of urban ropeways is becoming increasingly popular worldwide, especially for the tourism sector. They are easy to integrate with local public transport infrastructure, compared with other means of transport, and they optimally complement road and rail.
75 per cent Swiss added value
This extraordinary export transaction with Swiss added value representing about three-quarters of the order value is insured by SERV. We are supporting the project with pre-shipment risk insurance as well as buyer credit insurance to the value of about EUR 27.5 million, for a financing term of ten years. The financing contains project-specific securities and, thanks to SERV’s AAA rating, offers from attractive financing conditions.
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