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Patna,(BiharTimes): After months of jams and chaos the state government has now decided to fix the responsibility of smooth traffic flow on Mahatma Gandhi Setu (bridge) on the DMs and SPs of Patna and Vaishali districts.
Two lanes of this four-lane bridge have been closed for traffic as some portions are getting repaired.
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In the absence of any traffic maintenance system and slow progress in the repair works jams are almost a daily phenomenon. Keeping this in mind a large number of engineering and medical aspirants, who went to appear in the Screening Test of the BCECE in Muzaffarpur had to go a day ahead of Friday (April 22) to appear in it. Otherwise, Muzaffarpur is just a two-hour drive from Patna and candidates could easily have reached Muzaffarpur before 11:00 AM on the same day.
Commuters, who go to work in East Central Railway headquarters in Hajipur and a large number of other travellers––students, traders, patients etc––are finding it extremely difficult to cope up with the situation now.According to the road construction minister Nand Kishore Yadav the spans of the bridge
are in perfect condition; only the super-structure needs complete revamp. It will cost Rs 167 crore and the state government had approached the Centre in this regard as this is a part of National Highway,
whose primary responsibility lies with the Centre. “We are also asking for NOC from the Centre so that we can change the superstructure on our own,” he said.Better late than never: the Bihar government’s
directive come on Sunday after a high-level meeting chaired by the chief minister, Nitish Kumar.Senior officials of the road construction department, Bihar Rajya Pul Nirman Nigam, the DMs and SPs of Patna and Vaishali took part in the meeting.Sources said that due to panchayat election there was shortage of magistrates and cops to man the traffic on the 5.5 km long bridge.There is no one to check overtaking on the bridge. This often leads to chaos and anarchy.
The closure of road-cum-rail Rajendra Bridge near Mokama for heavy vehicles have increased the pressure on Setu. Around 20,000 heavy vehicles use Gandhi Setu daily. The Mokama bridge is under-
going repair work too.With rail-cum-road bridges in Patna and Munger not yet complete Bihar has just one good bridge left to connect north and south––that is in Bhagalpur, which is too far in the east. That bridge came up a decade ago and is in good condition.
As landlocked Nepal too had to rely for import and export of goods through the transit point in Kolkata these bridges are lifeline not only for Bihar but also for the Himalayan republic.
Based on report prepared by V K Raina, a nationally reputed civil engineer, the state government had sent a proposal worth Rs 167 crore to the Centre for undertaking the bridge repair work in September 2010. Raina inspected the bridge in June last year.
Though the state government is passing the blame to the Centre for not releasing the funds even as seven months have passed the latter is saying that the state has woken up to the problem much later.
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