Authorities in India's eastern Bihar state have suspended the engineering department's top official following the collapse of an under-construction bridge over the Ganges river.
A portion of the Aguwani-Sultanganj bridge in the state’s Bhagalpur district fell into the river on Sunday evening. The bridge was being built at a cost of more than 17 billion rupees ($205 million).
This was the second time that the same portion of the bridge has collapsed, the government said, after receiving initial findings on the incident from the government-funded Indian Institute of Technology.
“It may be recalled that a portion of this bridge had collapsed on April 30 last year. We had, thereafter, approached IIT-Roorkee to conduct a study. It is yet to come up with a final report but experts who had studied the structure had informed us that there were serious defects,” Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav said at a press conference.
He said “many structural defects have been pointed out by experts and we have already pulled down many portions which have been flagged as particularly vulnerable.”
A court petition on Monday sought an independent investigation instead of a departmental inquiry into the incident. SP Singla Company was involved in the construction of the bridge.
Petitioner Manibhsuhan Pratap Sengar has written to Patna High Court and sought recovery of losses of billions of rupees to the government following the collapse of the bridge.
SP Singla Company is also building the Okha-Beyt Dwarka Signature Bridge, a cable-stayed sea bridge in India, connecting Beyt Dwarka island in the Gulf of Kutch and Okha.
A 233-metre bridge built over the Machchhu river near the town of Morbi in Gujarat, during British rule in the 19th century, collapsed in October last year, killing at least 135 people.
