MUMBAI: After years of delays and legal wrangling, India’s first “sea bridge” opens to traffic today, aiming to ease chronic congestion on Mumbai’s notoriously choked roads.
It is hoped that the 16.5-billion-rupee ($340-million) eight-lane freeway will help cut the 40-minute journey between the suburbs of Bandra and Worli to just eight minutes.
But as the bridge opens, to ease the bottleneck of honking cars, lorries and motorbikes on the mainland, there are hopes, too, that as well as showing off India’s engineering prowess, it can inspire other projects elsewhere.
“Undoubtedly the Bandra-Worli Sea Link is an engineering marvel which shows that Indian construction players have come of age, and are capable of matching global counterparts,” said Hitesh Agrawal, head of research with Angel Broking.
“However, the government needs to look into critical issues to ensure infrastructure projects are not delayed,” he told AFP.
India’s infrastructure is in desperate need of an overhaul but road, rail, airport and power schemes have often been delayed by tortuous state bureaucracy, a lack of private sector funding and land ownership disputes.
The sweeping, 5.6-km Bandra-Worli Sea Link was first commissioned in 2000 but work was held up until 2004 because of litigation and protests from the local fishing community.
Like many of India’s cities, upgrading Mumbai’s road system is a must.
Currently, about 125,000 vehicles criss-cross Mumbai north to south in each direction every day, according to the bridge’s builders, the Hindustan Construction Co. Ltd.
As private car ownership increases on the back of India’s economic boom and more people move to cities, 250 more vehicles are expected to drive the route every day, it added.
