Mumbai has several old bridges, but no agency keeps a record of their age and repairs they’ve undergone or need. And a mishap invariably provokes a blame game.
Mumbai: Mumbai thrives on several old bridges, some dating back to even the colonial era. But, no agency has a full record of exactly how many of them are weak or decrepit and which of these have undergone the necessary repairs, a major concern in the wake of the overbridge collapse in the suburban Andheri earlier this week.
There are 314 new and old bridges in the city which are maintained by at least five different government agencies. Each of them can be seen passing the buck in case of any mishap.
For instance, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the Western Railway are now locked in a blame game after the Andheri incident earlier this week.
“There is no consolidated bridge management system. We are working towards preparing an inventory, which should be ready in the next few days,” said S.O. Kori, chief engineer, bridges at the BMC.
“Once we have a basic inventory in place we can work towards a more accurate bridge management system,” he added.
When the bridges built during the colonial rule near the end of their lifespan, the British government, which has a consolidated record of such structures, usually sends letters to its Indian counterparts recommending action.
In case of the Mahad bridge that crashed in 2016, the British government had sent a letter to the Maharashtra authorities saying that the bridge was nearing the end of its lifespan and needed to be demolished/restored.
The BMC survey
The BMC started surveying the city’s bridges to prepare an inventory in September 2016, after the British-era bridge in Mahad over the Savitri river was washed away due to inundation.
It took up 274 bridges, including flyovers, subways, road overbridges and foot overbridges of the total 314 viaducts in the city for inspection.
Of the 274, 77 bridges are in the island city, 137 in the western suburbs and 60 in the eastern suburbs. Of the total, 77 fall on railway land.
“The British can send us reminders because even then they had a system of maintaining a record, inventory, database that clearly indicates how much a bridge can last,” said Sulakshana Mahajan, an urban planner.
“We should ideally have a database with the date of construction, name of the contractor who built it, the technology used to build the bridge, structural details, life expectancy, information about how often does the bridge need inspections, repairs, audits, and whether these have been carried out,” she added.
A city of old bridges
The 70-metre-long Gokhale bridge at Andheri, a portion of which crumbled earlier this week, was built in 1975.
Mumbai thrives on several such old bridges, many even older, such as the Elphinstone Road bridge in Lower Parel or the Tilak bridge in Dadar. The city’s old bridges are mostly overbridges built on railway tracks, facilitating east-west connectivity over the largely north-south aligned railway system.
“There must be about 30-40 bridges that are more than 40 years old, but we don’t have these exact statistics because there is no database. Once we have the inventory in place, we will have these numbers,” Kori said.
Sayli Udas Mankikar, senior research fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, said bridges can either become functionally obsolete due to ageing technology and depreciation or become structurally deficient and monitoring this involves complex engineering algorithmic systems.
“In most of the municipal corporations and agencies in India, we used old formulae and mostly visual methods to judge the damage to assets,” she said.
“Unfortunately, in India, the problem is not lack of expertise, but the paucity of modern technology and an integrated asset management system, which needs to be brought in sooner than later,” Mankikar added.
She said in Mumbai, bridges play a very crucial role as area connectors and retrofitting them means majorly hampering the traffic flow, and so, getting permissions from the traffic police for the agencies repairing them is also not an easy task.
Multiple agencies worsen the chaos
In the case of the Andheri bridge collapse, the BMC insists that it had disbursed funds to the Western Railway to maintain the structure, while the latter says repairing it was the civic body’s responsibility.
There is also a question of exactly which agency gave an approval to lay nearly 60 utility cables found below the paver blocks of the 3-metre-wide bridge that could have caused the structure to weaken.
Mahajan, who used to work as a planner with the Maharashtra Transformation Support Unit, a state government think-tank, added, “The government is so fractured here with several layers that making different agencies sit together and asking them to do something in a particular manner does not work. Everyone cites their own constraints.”
Mankikar said the jurisdictional issues can only be resolved through transparency and coordination, which is absent.
“The rules are clear in Mumbai. Any bridge going over railway land or tracks is the responsibility of the railways though funds might be given by the agency who built it,” she explained.
“One way to fix this problem is to have boards put up on every bridge telling people who it belongs to, its age, contractor’s name, the agency maintaining it, among others,” she said.
While primary responsibility for maintenance, repair and ultimate reconstruction of these ageing structures must remain that of the concerned agency – Railways, PWD, etc – in the interests of the safety of Bombay’s citizens, the BMC could take moral responsibility to play something more than a coordinating role. It has the financial resources and the technical manpower to underwrite the safety of these bridges. 2. The Chief Engineer ( Bridges ) of the BMC is now compiling a list of bridges in the city. The British, who left India seventy years ago, have a complete inventory and are thoughtful enough to keep advising the Indian authorities to take remedial measures. Bahut tehzeeb wale log thay, not a coincidence that the sun never set on their empire …