Bharuch: The woes of commuters and transporters owing to recurring horrible jams on the all important Ahmedabad-Mumbai section of National Highway 8 in Bharuch is going to be over today when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his 10 th visit to his home-state Gujarat today inaugurates India’s largest extra-dosed bridge on river Narmada here.

The 1344 meter long and 22.8 meter wide four lane cable stay bridge, the 3rd bridge over Narmada in Bharuch, built by Larsen & Tubro as part of Rs 379 crore six laning project of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) between km 192 to km 198 section of Bharuch-Surat segment of NH8.

The work for the bridge that bears similarity to the famous Golden Ears bridge of Vancouver in Canada was started in the middle of year 2014 after its construction was handed over to L& T following the failure of the earlier venture of HCC company which had got the order before it at a higher cost on built, operate, own and transfer (BOOT) basis. Under L & T the work was running ahead of schedule and the union road transport minister Nitin Gadkari had informed that it would be operational by September this year. Some officials related to project even went on to say that it would be ready by August. But it got delayed owing to various reasons and now is likely to be operational by March next year. Project Director of the NHAI S P Sharma said that certain land issues and the highly technical nature of the bridge had somewhat slowed down the pace of the work.

‘The uneven flow and level of water in the river had hampered some high precision work like placing the segments of the bridge at proper places through special boats. The water level in Narmada had gone down drastically during summers while after it during monsoon the high tide and release of water from dams during caused it surge. In such scenario the high precision works which involved carrying heavy weight segments weighing 132 tons each by boats got hampered. If precautionary measures were not taken, a major tragedy could occur. The whole bridge is made up of total 10 spans of which 8 are of 144 meters while the two on both ends are of 96 meters each. It is supported on cable stay and its highest point will be 120 ft high,’ Mr Sharma said.

He said that some land related issue also got it delayed. ‘some of the land in the river-bed was found to be in the name of farmers at a late stage and caused delay in acquisition,’ the project director said adding that it was not unusual for a project of such high technical nature to be delayed by a few months.

‘One can imagine the delicate nature of work by the very fact that some of the installations could not have been done if the wind speed would have crossed 40 km per hour limit. By October last year almost 80 to 85 % work was done. The remaining high precision work was completed later,’ the Project Director said.

This will be only fourth extra dosed bridge in the country. One of the example of such bridge in India is the new Vidya Sagar Setu bridge in Kolkata across river Hooghly. Such bridges use cable stay to support the segments of bridges with very less number of pillars.Compared to a pure cable-stayed or cantilever-girder bridge of comparable span, an extradosed bridge uses much shorter stay-towers or pylons than the cable-stayed bridge, and a significantly shallower deck/girder structure than used on the girder bridge. The first extradosed bridge in the country (over 196 metres long) was built for the Delhi Metro between Pragati Maidan and Indraprastha over railway tracks. The Canada bridge over river Fraser, with which the new Bharuch bridge will bear resemblance to, has only five spans.

The bridge constructed parallel to Sardar Bridge, made in 80’s during the regime of the them Prime Minister Smt Indira Gandhi (the other one being British Era 1881 built 1412 meters Golden Bridge) is expected to reduce frequent traffic jams on this stretch of NH-8, which is the busiest road in the country, connecting Mumbai to Delhi. As per an estimate an average of over 10000 trucks are reported to ply daily on the NH-8 in Gujarat. This bridge will not only serve the traffic from the ports of Hazira and Dahej, but will also cater to the heavy flow of industrial traffic on the Golden Corridor between Ankleshwar, Bharuch, Surat and Dahej SEZ. The development will also remove a significant bottleneck and facilitate free movement of traffic.

The NH 8 in Bharuch had seen many horrible jams during the routine maintenance work on the Sardar Bridge on this one of the busiest national highways. In June last year it had led to an around 40-km-long traffic jam leaving over 20,000 vehicles trapped on the highway for over two days.Such jams on this highway which is a key transport corridor translated in to huge financial losses as well.

The new bridge on being operational will not only give respite to common commuters but also a major boost to the economy by smoothing the industrial and commercial traffic.

DeshGujarat