New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate India’s longest rail-cum-road bridge on the mighty Brahmaputra river on Tuesday, in a big boost to the rail and road infrastructure in the country. The 4.94 kilometre-long ‘Bogibeel Bridge‘ is the PM’s Christmas gift to the nation, which coincidentally is also former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday.
Sanctioned in 1997-98 during the prime ministership of H D Deve Gowda, who also laid the foundation stone, the project took close to 20 years to see the light of day. The work, however, began only in 2002 when Vajpayee was the prime minister. The bridge spans from Dibrugarh in Assam to Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh.
To build the bridge, approximately 3 million bags of cement, around 19250 tonnes of reinforcement steel and around 2800 tonnes of structural steel was used to construct the structure. State-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd has apparently supplied 35,400 tonnes of steel for the construction of the bridge. The lower deck of the railway track has double line broad gauge tracks, while the upper deck of the bridge is a three-lane road.
This is the fourth bridge to be built on the Brahmaputra, the others being the Naranarayan Setu, Kolia Bhomora Setu and Bhupen Hazarika Setu.
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