PM Modi inaugurates Dhola-Sadiya,India’s longest bridge in Assam

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated on Friday India's longest span, the 9.15 km Dhola-Sadiya bridge across river Lohit at the easternmost tip of Assam, on May 26.

The bridge is 3.55 km longer than the Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Mumbai. The opening of the bridge is among the highlights of Modi's programme during his visit to Assam to attend the first anniversary of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government.

Lohit is one of three rivers the others are Dibang and Siang that meet to form the Brahmaputra downstream of the site of the bridge that connects Dhola village and Sadiya town, 540 km east of Assam's principal city Guwahati.

Sadiya is the birthplace of balladeer Bhupen Hazarika. The bridge, designed to facilitate the movement of battle tanks, is expected to help movement of troops to the border with China in the Wallong-Kibithu sector in southern Arunachal Pradesh. The sector had fallen along with Tawang in the northwest to the Chinese in the 1962 war.

The project, worth Rs 950 crore, was started in 2011. It will reduce the travel time for people on either bank of river Lohit by at least eight hours.

But Dhola-Sadiya is not the only bridge in the Northeast that will go into the record books. 9.15 km Dhola-Sadiya bridge is longer than the Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Mumbai. (HT Photo/Pronib Das ) Bogibeel connects Dibrugarh town on the southern bank of Brahmaputra and Silapathar on the northern bank.

But the progress of the project, undertaken by the firm that build Bandra-Worli Sea Link, has been slow. The cost has thus spiralled from the initial Rs 1,767 crore in 2002 to Rs 6,000 crore now.