The Bogibeel bridge opens today after the foundation stone was laid in 1997 in Assam. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the bridge, the railroad structure connects Assam’s Dibrugarh and Dhemaji districts, bordering Arunachal Pradesh.
The 5 kilometer rail-cum-road bridge was built across a ten kilometer wide Brahmaputra river. It will cut the travel time between the Dibrugarh and Dhemaji by four hours and avoid a 170-km detour.
The bridge has much greater significance for India’s defence movements towards the Indo-China border in the east. The is strong enough to support the tanks and fighter jet landings on the bridge.
This is the longest bridge for India and goes onto to become the second longest rail-cum-road bridge for Asia. The bridge has extreme low maintenance costs and has a lifespan of over 120 years.
The bridge has a two-line railway track on the lower deck and a three-lane road on the top deck. It reduces the Delhi to Dibrugarh train travel time by about three hours.
The early flood waters in the monsoon in the Brahmaputra, it restricted the working season to between November to March and demanded huge mobilization of construction equipment.
The bridge had an initial estimate costs of ₹1700 crore but with continual delays the costs tripled, the final costs of the bridge is ₹5900 crore.
The project took 30 lakh bags of cement which is enough to fill 41 olympic swimming pools and 19,250 metres of reinforcement steel which is twice the height of Mount Everest.