The new Tallah bridge is far from ready and PWD engineers overseeing the project said the structure is unlikely to be opened before June-end.
Officials had earlier said the new bridge would be opened in April.
Engineers supervising the Rs 350-crore project in north Kolkata said only about 40 per cent of the work over railway tracks was over.
“A lot remains to be done before a 240m-long span over the tracks is covered with concrete deck slabs,” said an engineer.
Also, the construction of the two approach roads to the bridge — one from the Shyambazar-end and the other from the Paikpara-end — has not yet started.
“It’s unlikely the bridge will be opened before June-end,” said the engineer
North Kolkata's traffic has been a mess since the old bridge was closed in February 2020 after engineers performed a test and opined that the structure had lost much of its load-bearing capacity and could collapse any day.
The perennially-busy bridge, which was a key link between the city and pockets on the northern fringes such as Sinthee, Baranagar, Dunlop and Barrackpore, was later pulled down.
The approach from the Shyambazar-end will be 180m-long and the one from the Paikpara-end will stretch 190m. The 750m-long Tallah bridge will have six piers on either side and another six in the middle, which will support the 240m-long deck slab over the railway tracks.
The Telegraph visited the construction site on Friday and saw workers trying to locate the CESC cables and underground pipes that carry drinking water from Palta to the Tallah reservoir.
Once the layout of the water pipes is mapped, they would be covered with steel casings to ensure they are not damaged during boring for the construction of pillars.
On the other end, close to Shyamabazar, rigs were being lowered to test the quality of the soil before workers started digging the soil to erect piers.
A section of senior PWD officials and their counterparts in Larsen and Toubro (L&T), which is building the bridge, listed some of the reasons for the delay. These include:
- Several man-days were lost during the third wave of Covid infections in January, when a large number of workers tested positive.
- Supply of special steel from Rourkela got delayed because of pandemic-induced restrictions. The supply that was to reach in December arrived in February.
- As a result, fabrication work of steel at a railway-approved workshop in Panagarh got delayed.
