Nagaon Bypass to Dibrugarh 4 Way Lane: Crucial bridge Remains a Distant Dream!

Four-lane highway from Nagaon Bypass to Dibrugarh

Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, Aug 7: For the people of Assam the four-lane national highway project from Nagaon Bypass to Dibrugarh continues to remain a distant dream, if not a pipe dream.

The four-lane highway from Nagaon Bypass to Dibrugarh is snaking through central and upper Assam via Kaliabor, Tezpur, Gohpur, and Numaligarh. The 40-km stretch of the highway from Gohpur-Numaligarh has a crucial bridge over the Brahmaputra. The snail’s pace of the project can be gauged from the fact that even the detailed project report (DPR) of the crucial bridge has not been finalized as yet. The DPR of the bridge was scheduled to be finalized by March 2017. M/s Luis Berger, a consultancy firm entrusted with the task of preparing the DPR, has missed the target schedule. Thanks to the kind of urgency attached to the project by NHIDCL (National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation), a fully-owned company of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, which is implementing the highway project. What is fraught within this snail’s pace of work of the national highway project is time and cost escalation, besides communication bottlenecks which the people in the State and the region have to confront. The slow progress of the project keeps on distancing people’s dream of the four-lane highway coming into a reality in this part of Northeast India.

Of course, the work for another bridge of the project over the Brahmaputra in the 17.3-km stretch from Kaliabor Tiniali-Dolabari near Tezpur is going on. The progress of work of the stretch is 35.23 percent even as it is also running behind schedule.

Since the development of road infrastructure is directly related to the development of an area, a question that pricks everybody’s conscience is: why is the NHIDCL paddling so slowly when it comes to the development of road infrastructure in the Northeast, especially in Assam?