India’s longest bridge project is finally surging ahead, overcoming hurdles.
The bridge on the mighty Brahmaputra at Assam’s Bogibeel that promises to be a lifeline for the Northeast has run into several time and cost overruns since former Prime Minister A B Vajpayee inaugurated it in 2002. Finally, the project is moving to meet the December 2016 deadline at an estimated cost of nearly Rs 5,000 crore.
“We are looking at a 2016end date of completion,” said Arun Karambelkar, president and COO, HCC, which is building the superstructure along with DSD, a German company, and the Bangalore-based VNR.
Construction of the substructure was awarded to Gammon-India in April 2008. HCC,
which executed the BandraWorli Sea Link, holds a 51% stake in the joint venture. The consortium was awarded a Rs 987-crore contract in 2008.
The 4.94-km rail-cum-road bridge has been a mega project of the North East Frontier Railway, but couldn’t be started until 2007 when it was given national status to be eligible for 75 % funding from the finance ministry.
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The bridge will connect upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, which is barely 20km from the north bank, and reduce the distance to the China border by 10 hours, thus strengthening the country’s security.
(This year’s Budget has put Arunachal on the railway map with the announcement of two links.) The Bogibeel bridge with its immense strategic importance will dramatically improve connectivity between the north and south banks of the Brahmaputra, cutting short
travel time to Arunachal by barely half hour. It is located 17km downstream of Dibrugarh town and has been connected to NH 37 on the south bank and NH 52 on the north.
Rail-wise, it will link Chowalkhowa in the south and join between Sisi Borgaon and Sirpani on the north bank.
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The double-deck bridge, with a three-lane road over a double railway track, received a fresh lease of life as its first 125m fully-welded girder span was recently fixed. The bridge will have 39 welded girders, each 125m wide and two shore spans of 32.75m each.
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With each span weighing 1,700MT, the pulling force required to construct the bridge is like pulling 26 Airbuses. The superstructure requires 70,000MT of steel, which is equal to 10 Eiffel Towers. Being India's first fully welded bridge, the total length of welding done is nearly 12,800km (akin to circling the Moon 1.5 times).
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The biggest hurdle for the project has been the turbulent Brahmaputra, which restricts work to four months a year due to the monsoon and floods.
HCC would have completed the project in 2015 had the railways not insisted on a 100% ratio of argon gas for welding the steel.
“But that was causing cracks.
So, after a series of tests to ensure longer life, the proportion was changed to 80-20 and we could get on with the work,“ project manager K Nageswara Rao said. On Gammon's part, 15 of the 42 piers are yet to be completed.
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