Patna: On June 16, 2020, cloistered inside his “Samvad Hall” in Patna in the middle of a raging pandemic, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar inaugurated the Sattarghat bridge across the turbulent river Gandak via videoconferencing. The bridge, which connects Kesaria in East Champaran to Faizalpur in Gopalganj was eight years in the making, its foundation stone laid by Kumar in 2012. On that June day, Kumar was peeved. He said that ordinarily, he would have liked to travel to the spot “to inspect the quality of work before the formal inauguration.” His fears were not unfounded. Twenty-nine days later, a section of the brand new bridge, including an approach road, collapsed into the water.
In the days that followed, an embarrassed Bihar government ordered an inquiry by a high-level team of experts led by Ramakar Jha, the head of the civil engineering department of the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Patna. The panel attributed the collapse to the changing course of Gandak which enters Bihar from Nepal. In June 2021, it recommended pulling down an 810-metre portion of the approach road to create additional pathways for the water to pass. Little was done, and in one monsoon season after another, both Gopalganj and Saran, have seen widespread flooding.
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Much has happened in Bihar since June 2020. A pandemic has come and gone, exacting a tragic price. Political allegiances have changed — Nitish Kumar left the NDA and joined the Mahagatbandhan; then left the Mahagatbandhan and joined the NDA. And yet, there are two constants. One, that Nitish Kumar has survived wave upon wave of choppy political waters to remain chief minister. And second, as Bihar’s rivers continue to turn, bridges continue to collapse under the weight of shoddy maintenance, the lack of a plan, and complete mismanagement.
Take for instance, these last three weeks which have seen 12 bridges, big and small, collapse.
Changing rivers Four of the collapses over the past two weeks have been across a small rivulet of the Gandak — called the Gandaki — in Siwan. While there have been no deaths or injuries in these incidents, engineers in the water resources department (WRD) have blamed them on a “sudden and unexpectedly huge” flow of water in the river. Prima facie, an inquiry report, submitted to the Siwan district magistrate on June 24, said that gushing currents eroded the soil around the main pillars of the bridges, dislocating them from their original position. This was attributed to a rise in the flow of the water from Nepal, which saw heavy rains in June.
Except, the rise in river water should be far from a surprise. It happens year on year, and in one Bihar region after another.
On June 18, in Araria, 390km away from Siwan, a section of the 282m-long RCC (reinforced cement concrete) bridge on the Bakra river in Sikta block saw severe damage, with three to four spans of the structure — being built by RWD at the cost of ₹12 crore, crumbling into the river. Engineers who inspected the bridge, found the same reason — “damages due to the changing course of the river”.
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Exactly two years before that, on June 18, 2022, two pillars of a four-lane bridge between Bihpur and Funaut villages in Naugachhiya were washed away when the Kosi river moved southward. River basin expert Dinesh Kumar Mishra said, “The bridge was part of a 30km road that connects Bihpur in Bhagalpur to Birpur in Supaul. The construction company is said to have lost more than ₹ 200 crore. But that is the risk the contractors have to face with a turbulent river like the Kosi.”
Mishra said that the Kosi’s swirling currents during the monsoon forces both the river and its tributaries to change course. “The Kosi comes down to Bihar from a steep height and with a heavy load of silt. An insignificant stream of the Kosi flowing even two to three kilometres away from the main course of the river can turn into a major waterway, affecting the structures that lie in its path,” Mishra said.
But professor Ramakar Jha, the NIT professor who inspected the Sattarghat bridge, said that rivers changing the course were hardly surprising, and could not be used as the excuse for collapsing bridges. “The construction companies and executing agencies should not resort to such a poor alibi. Instead, what should happen are good feasibility studies to understand the hydrology of the river. If a project costs between ₹200 and ₹300 crore, these feasibility exercise will not take more than a crore,” Jha said.
Design flaws and lack of a policy Experts pointed out that government administrators and architects in Bihar largely use the Lacey method (named after Gerald Lacey who came up with it in the 1930s) — based on the concept of a regime channel where silt grade and charge remain constant and then provides equations that help calculate velocity, hydraulic meant depth and bed slope — to evaluate the hydrology of the river. “But the Lacey method is largely applied to evaluate canals. In Bihar, engineers often resort to this method to evaluate the hydrology of rivers which they then use to plan the design of bridges. It is no wonder that their piers and foundations get damaged when there is an unexpectedly high current,” Ramakar Jha said.
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Mishra said that there now needs to be an extensive hydrological analysis of all rivers in Bihar, particularly those that gush down from the Himalayas. “Never before, have I heard of so many bridges coming down in such a short span of time. There is something amiss in both their design, and the nature of the rivers owing to climate change. The structures of bridges usually weaken when gushing currents erode soil around the foundation of piers and make deck-slabs unstable. Concerned departments must conduct safety audits before the onset of every monsoon,” Mishra said.
Senior government officials also said that rampant sand-mining, which impinges on the carrying capacity of rivers, makes a shift in their path easier, and weakens structures, is a problem to contend with. Sunil Kumar, vice president of the Indian Engineers’ Federation and executive engineer of the Bihar Police building corporation said, “The norms state that no mining of sand will be done within 500 metres of the bridge. But this rule is rarely adhered to, which poses risks to the foundation of a bridge. Recently, the Indian Railways were forced to carry out a strengthening of the piers for the 160 year old Abdul Bari bridge on the river Sone, after it was found that they had weakened due to rampant sand mining.”
Officials pointed to other man-made crises as well — in particular the hasty grant of approvals to projects deemed key by the state government. Patna’s Marine Drive or the Jaya Prakash Ganga Pathway, a 21.5km driveway on the southern banks of the Ganga built at the cost of ₹3,106 crore and approved in 2007, for instance, was called by one executive engineer of the water resources department, who asked not be quoted, as an example of “disturbing natural flow”. “It is being built on the southern bank of the Ganga. The project was given a go ahead despite reservations from environmentalists who had feared that this will cause the river to shift away from Patna. This has now happened and there is flooding on the plains of Hajipur and Muzaffarpur,” he said.
Pankaj Malviya, who was part of a volunteer campaign that raised concerns on the project, said, “The Ganga Pathway is now forcing the river to deposit silt on the Patna side of the bank. The river bed is being flattened because of the silt which is left behind because of the obstruction in the flow.”
The bridge was meant to ease Patna’s notorious traffic from east to west and construction began in 2013, but was only opened for traffic in June 2022. “This is because the road design, being constructed as a mix of at-grade and elevated shapes had to be changed because of the pattern of the flow of the Ganga. Box canals, which were meant to ensure the unhindered flow of water have still not been built, allowing people to encroach the river bank,” the WRD engineer quoted above said.
Even more damningly, while Bihar has laid out norms for maintenance of public infrastructure such as roads, it has no such policy for the maintenance of bridges. Officials admit that formulating a “bridge maintenance policy” often comes up in the wake of a bridge collapse, but fades quickly into memory. “Beyond this, the department spends very little time and money on the maintenance of bridges. Recently, the chief secretary held a review meeting in the wake of the collapse of the twelve bridges directed officials to frame the bridge maintenance policy to be approved by the state legislature in the coming monsoon session. But I have heard the same things since 2018,” the executive engineer said.
The spate of bridge collapses have spurred a political furore in Bihar with the state assembly’s Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav saying that the frequent collapses was a metaphor for a failing “double engine government”– a reference to alliance partners, the JD(U) and the BJP being in charge both at the state and the Centre. “There is hardly a week that passes when the report of a bridge collapse doesn’t dominate the headlines,” Yadav said.
The government, however, has insisted that it has taken cognisance of the bridge collapses, and was taking stern action, pointing to rural works department minister Ashok Chaudhary ordering the suspension of three engineers involved in the construction and maintenance of the bridge that collapsed on the Bakra river. Former JD(U) minister and MLC Neeraj Kumar said that he suspected a design behind the series of collapses, and that nobody guilty would be spared. “The CM is personally monitoring the situation and reviewing works of the road construction department and the rural works department to prevent recurrence of these collapses,” Neeraj Kumar said.
On July 3, Nitish directed the two departments to conduct a survey of all the old bridges in the state and identify those that require immediate repair. This came even as a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court on June 29, raising concerns about the safety and longevity of bridges in Bihar, particularly during floods and the monsoon. The petitioner, advocate Brajesh Singh, sought the setting up of real-time monitoring of bridges and said, “Such routine accrual of falling bridges in Bihar is disastrous as the lives of people at large are at stake. Therefore the urgent intervention of this court is required to save the lives of people.”
Bihar waits for intervention, as it waits, almost inevitably, for news of the next bridge collapse.