DIBRUGARH: The country's longest rail-cum-road bridge - the Bogibeel Bridge over the Brahmaputra in Dibrugarh - is likely to be ready by December this year.MK Singh, the deputy chief engineer of the Northeast Frontier Railway in charge of the project, on Monday said 70% of the work had been completed."The bridge should be ready by December if everything goes according to plan. Work has been expedited to meet the deadline. Already, 29 out of 42 girder spans have been launched. The remaining girders will be launched by July. A total of 125m of road has been built from the Dhemaji side (north bank) of the bridge. Work on laying railway tracks on the bridge will start soon," Singh told the media at the project site.He added that 70,000 MT of steel had been used to build the bridge's superstructure designed by a Denmark-based company. The bridge is also the first fully steel-welded bridge of the railways.The Bogibeel Bridge project has been 14 years in the making and has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the slowest-moving infrastructure projects in the northeast.On April 21, 2002, construction work on the 4.94-km bridge was inaugurated by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Its foundation was laid by one of his predecessors, HD Deve Gowda, on January 22, 1997. As a result of the multiple delays and revised deadlines, the final cost of the mega project is expected to touch Rs 5,000 crore as against the original budget of Rs 1,767 crore.The Bogibeel bridge will connect Dibrugarh on the south bank of the river with Dhemaji on the north bank. It will be a double-decked bridge featuring two railway lines on the lower deck and a three-lane road on the upper deck, flanked by footpaths on either side. The upper deck will be 10.5m above the the lower deck.The project includes construction of 29.45km of road (including the bridge) and a rail link of 74km. The road will be connected to NH-37 (Dibrugarh) and NH-52 (Dhemaji).The bridge, which is the fourth over the Brahmaputra, will facilitate easy connectivity between eastern Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and benefit nearly five million people.

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