Nitin Gadkari to inaugurate cable-stayed bridge on Mandovi River today

A 5.1-kilometre long cable-stayed bridge on Mandovi River will be opened for public use on Sunday by Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, a senior official said.

Siddharth Kunkolienkar, vice chairman of the Goa Infrastructure Development Corporation Saturday said the four-lane bridge, weighing 2.5 lakh tonnes, will decongest Panaji considerably which currently sees 66,000 vehicles enter every day.

"Union Minister Nitin Gadkari will inaugurate the bridge in the presence of Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Sunday," he informed.

Calling it an aesthetically pleasing landmark for the coastal state, the GIDC vice chairman said, " The bridge is made of 1 lakh cubic metres of high strength, high performance concrete enough to fill 40 Olympic size swimming pools. It weighs 2.5 lakh tonnes which is equivalent to that of 570 Boeing aircraft."

He added that 13,000 tonnes of corrosion resistant reinforcement steel, 32,000 square metres of structural steel plates and 1,800 kilometres of high tensile pre-stressing strands have gone into making the bridge.

"The bridge has 88 high tensile strength cables in the state-of-art single place harp type cable stay system. It has a real-time force monitoring mechanism," he added.

The bridge is a joint effort of GIDC and engineering and construction major Larsen and Toubro.