Uttarakhand's first Signature Bridge, which was under construction at Narkota near Rudraprayag on the Rishikesh-Badrinath Highway collapsed on Thursday. Fortunately, there were no workers or passersby at the time of the collapse, averting a major mishap from occuring.
Following the collapse, the Rudraprayag district administration ordered an investigation in the incident.
"The incident happened at 4.15 pm. The foundation is intact. Only the tower collapsed. A technical committee will look into the incident and see what went wrong," NDTV quoted an official as saying.
The 110 meter long bridge was being constructed at a cost of about Rs 66 crores under the All Weather Project in Narokota. The project had begun back in 2021, and was under construction since then.
It was being built to alleviate the traffic congestion caused by the Sirobgadh landslide and was said to be the state's first curved bridge.
In 2022, the base of the same bridge had collapsed, claiming the lives of three workers in the accident.
Subsequently, the construction work started again and picked up pace. It was supposed to be completed by May this year. However, it could not be completed and ended up collapsing again.
The construction of the bridge was sponsored by Rail Vikas Nigam that had handed over the project to National Highway Srinagar section that in turn gave the project to a company named RCC Developers.
This was the first curved bridge being built on the Badrinath National Higwhay in Uttarakhand.
District Panchayat member Narendra Bisht and Deputy Pradhan Natkota Kuldeep Joshi stated that RCC Developers shoud be blacklisted.
They said that several concerns had bee raised over the construction of the bridge, ever since the work began. The company did not learn a lesson, even after the previous incident of 2022, when the bridge's base had collapsed, they said.
Rudraprayag Sub-district Magistrate Ashish Ghildiyal stated that the bridge has been inspected. A technical committee to probe the collapse has been formed to conduct a thorough investigation, he said.
The reasons behind the collapse of the bridge are yet to be ascertained.