Careless in kolkata

Careless in kolkata

The city’s bridges are collapsing with worryingly regular frequency.

The collapse of the arterial Majerhat bridge in Kolkata comes hard on the heels of the Vivekananda flyover collapse which killed 27 people in a crowded part of the city, and amounts to Kolkata’s third bridge collapse since 2013. In Majerhat’s instance the casualty figure would have been far higher than the one person who died and 21 who were injured, had the bridge collapsed at rush hour. Unfortunately, regular maintenance of urban infrastructure – the daily bread-and-butter work – is not considered glamorous enough to feature high among the government’s priorities.

While chief minister Mamata Banerjee says she is personally monitoring rescue operations such disasters are happening in the city with worryingly regular frequency, suggesting no lessons are being learnt. The Majerhat bridge, in use since the mid-1960s, is one of Kolkata’s most heavily used structures. It connects the city proper with the south western suburb of Behala (now within the city’s municipal and police jurisdiction) and the more densely populated urban areas of the South 24 Parganas district. Behala alone has close to a million residents and the Majerhat bridge is this entire population’s most important link with the rest of the city. The spend on this facility’s maintenance has not been commensurate with the load it bears and its importance to the city’s overall traffic grid.

The state chief secretary has asked for a report from the PWD but government reports are often buried under the weight of the paper they are written on. It would be safe to say that the bridge did not get the upkeep it needed. Kolkata has several bridges of similar vintage (Durgapur bridge, Dhakuria bridge, structures spanning the canal in north and east Kolkata). Focus should now shift to these structures so that similar disasters are averted.