The Railways expects the completion of the Bogibeel rail-cum-road bridge in Assam by July.
Conceived in 1996, work on the 5-km bridge was inordinately delayed. The bridge will connect the south bank of the Brahmaputra in Dibrugarh with Silapathar in Dhemaji district on Assam-Arunachal border.
This is the second major bridge to be completed in Upper Assam after the completion of the Dhola-Sadiya bridge on the Lohit river, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, last year. Together they will improve the connectivity with Arunachal Pradesh and serve strategic purposes.
“We expect to complete the construction of Bogibeel bridge in July,” AK Yadav, Chief Administrative Officer (Construction) of the North-East Frontier Railway, said at a seminar on the importance of infrastructure in regional development at Guwahati on Monday-Tuesday.
Faster travel
The seminar was jointly organised by Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a Ministry of External Affairs-sponsored think-tank, Ministry of Finance, and FICCI.
Meanwhile, travellers to the North-East States can expect a reduction in journey time, as the Railways expects to complete in three years the doubling of the 590-km key track from New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal to Lumding in Upper Assam, serving almost the entire North-East.
The project, sanctioned in August 2017, will require constructing a second bridge at Saraighat. Currently, even the Rajdhani Express takes nearly 11 hours to cross the section, which connects the far-flung North-East States. The Railways converted all lines in the North-East to broad-gauge in 2017. The Narendra Modi government approved ₹90,000-crore rail projects fior the region. This includes connectivity to all State capitals by 2020.
Itanagar, capital of Arunachal Pradesh, got both air and broad-gauge connectivity last year. The Railways is pursuing strategic projects to connect areas up to the China border. The metre-gauge connectivity to Agartala was converted into broad gauge and extended up to Sabroom on the Bangladesh border.
Yadav confirmed that the rail projects in the North- East are moving at a fast pace as the budgetary provisions have nearly doubled in the last four years.
He promised that the broad- gauge connectivity to both Imphal in Manipur, and Aizawl in Mizoram will be ready on time.