DIBRUGARH, Dec 14 � Given the current pace of work on the Bogibeel bridge over the Brahmaputra river, it is unlikely that the facility will be available for public use any time earlier than 2017. A major constraint responsible for the poor pace of work on the nearly 5 km-long road-cum-rail bridge is the unavailability of funds. The bridge was declared a national project in 2008, but there is still a debilitating resource crunch.
While Mamata Banerjee as the Railway Minister was known to be unmindful of the railway requirements and demands of the North-eastern Region, Assam�s own Congress MPs, too, have done nothing to espouse the cause of the bridge. On both banks of the Bogibeel bridge are two Congress MPs � Rani Narah on the north bank (Lakhimpur constituency) and Paban Singh Ghatowar on the south bank (Dibrugarh constituency). Both are also Union ministers. And both have miserably failed to impress on the Railway Ministry and the Union Cabinet to make funds available for this very crucial transportation infrastructure.
With the Railway administration failing to meet its financial commitments with regard to making payments to contractors, even petty contractors and subcontractors, too, are facing the crunch. Already, the HCC-VNR joint venture, which is working on the bridge superstructure, owes more than a crore of rupees to its local vendors here. Non-payment of local dues triggered a law-and-order problem at the HCC-VNR work campus at Bogibeel a few months ago. Local vendors are getting restive once again, following a huge accumulation of dues.
At the substructure front too, contractor Gammon India is yet to complete the construction of all the 41 piers in all these ten years and more since the commencement of work. Six piers are yet to come up in the mid-section of the bridge, and nobody is willing to set a deadline for the end of the construction work on these six posts. Without the posts, the superstructure cannot be installed and without this, neither the railway tracks nor the road asphalt can be laid on the double-decker bridge.
Local residents here and elsewhere in the State have been looking forward to the early construction of the Bogibeel bridge ever since HD Deve Gowda, the then Prime Minister, first laid its foundation stone in 1997. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee repeated the foundation laying ceremony in May, 1999 and went to the extent of declaring that the bridge and its ancillary works would be completed in five years. Fourteen years since, not even half the bridge has been completed. To add to the agony of the people, none of the Bogibeel project administrators is willing to speak of any construction deadline on record.