Work on Mahakali Bridge halted since 3 months

Work on a four-lane concrete bridge under construction on the Mahakali River in Kanchanpur, one of the largest projects in the far-western region, has been affected for three and a half months.

The construction of the project, which was affected by the floods in the Mahakali River in the first week of October last year, has not been able to pick up speed. The construction work has been halted due to the process of changing the design to make a 'guideband' to be built on the sides of the bridge. Earlier, it was said that a 'guideband' of large stone would be made, but since the large stone could not be managed, the initiative of design change has been taken forward. "We needed about 181,000 cubic meters of stone to build the guideband," said Kishore Raj Pandey, an engineer at Kumar Shrestha Construction Company and China Fuel Construction Company (CFC) JV, which is in charge of the construction of the bridge.

He informed that the work of slope of the bridge has been completed. "Under the 7.8 km six-lane access road, four km of roads have been blacktopped," said Engineer Pandey.

According to him, 70 percent of the stones weighing more than 257 kilograms and 30 percent of the 20 to 40 kilograms were needed to make the guideband. The bridge project, which is being constructed at a cost of Rs 3.66 billion, has already achieved 72 percent progress.

"Preparations are being made for the railing and painting work of the bridge," he said. It is planned to build 5,400 meters of dam on both sides of the bridge, which is being developed as a trade gateway to the far-west.

Durga Awasthi, an engineer at the Mahakali Bridge Planning Office, said that the file has been submitted to the department for changing the design of the wideband. "There has been some delay in the design changes due to the pandemic," he said. "The design changes will be completed soon." He said that other works of the bridge were underway.

The construction period of the bridge started from fiscal year 2017/18. The floods in Mahakali last May and November had caused a loss of over Rs 200 million to the construction company.