After A string of Collapses, Bihar Rolls Out Bridge Maintenance Policy

Patna: Bihar, which faced disgrace last year for its crumbling bridges, came up with a management and maintenance policy on Wednesday. A cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar approved it.

Prepared by the Road Construction Department (RCD), it has been ‘Bihar State Bridge Management and Maintenance Policy, 2025’. It has been framed to ensure that their usefulness remains intact during their lifespan with the help of proper and timely upkeep.

The need for a maintenance policy for bridges

The RCD has 3,968 bridges built on its roads in the last 18 years. These include 532 mega bridges, major bridges, and flyovers. They helped bring ease in travelling and commuting across the state during Nitish’s regime.

“Effective management and maintenance become important after the construction of a large number of bridges. The lack of an adequate maintenance policy leads to the possibilities of sudden accidents, loss of lives and disruption of traffic in the event of damage to the bridges. It also leads to economic losses. Therefore, a bridge management and maintenance policy was much needed,” Bihar Cabinet Secretariat Department's additional chief secretary (ACS) S Siddharth said.

The bridge maintenance policy and how the bridges will be assessed

The policy has been formed as per the provisions of the Indian Road Congress (IRC) and the bridges would be maintained in two phases during the entire projected design life.

In the first phase, the bridges would be classified as per their length into three categories – mega bridges (more than 1000 metres), major bridges (more than 60 metres) and minor bridges (less than 60 metres) – and their health cards would be prepared.

The Bridge Health Index (BHI) would be used to show the actual physical condition of the bridges in their health cards. It uses the relative weight of the main components of the bridge and the types of distress.

The index is evaluated on a scale of 0 to 100. The bridge with a lesser BHI would be more critical, and their maintenance would be given preference on the basis of the Maintenance Priority Index (MPI), which in turn would be based on bridge geometry, fund utilisation, design factors, urgency, importance and other factors.

The physical condition of various components of bridges would be assessed with the help of visual inspection, non-destructive tests, sensor data, drone cameras, imaging tools and other techniques. The real-time monitoring of important bridges would also be done.

The maintenance work under the bridge policy

In the second phase of the Bihar State Bridge Management and Maintenance Policy, 2025, the actual maintenance of bridges would be chosen with the help of BHI and MPI.

Various factors of the maintenance of the bridges will include steps like, initial rectification, regular maintenance, periodic maintenance, minor improvement, special repair, exceptional repair, and unforeseeable repair.

The Bihar Rajya Pul Nirman Nigam Limited, a sister concern of the RCD, will implement the new policy through a ‘Bridge Maintenance Bidding Document’. It will also indulge in capacity building of RCD engineers and the development of a Bridge Information and Management System.

The new policy also fixes the role and responsibility of various superintending engineers, general managers, executive engineers, deputy general managers, senior project engineers, assistant engineers, managers, project engineers, and junior engineers of the RCD.

Bihar’s history of crumbling bridges

At least 18 big and small bridges collapsed in Bihar between June and October 2024, including a portion of the 5.5km-long under-construction bridge on the Ganga between Bakhtiyarpur (Patna district) – Tajpur (Samastipur district) falling down.

Portions of an under-construction bridge over the Ganga between Bhagalpur and Khagaria collapsed twice, while another under-construction bridge over the Kosi river in Supaul district also crumbled last year.

The state witnessed more than two dozen such bridge collapse incidents in 2023 and 2024. Every collapse reeked of lax quality control, substandard construction, and corruption.