Saga of the bridge across Zuari

One of the few nightmares that Goan newspapers like to revel in, is the collapse of the road bridge across Zuari river at Cortalim. The leading newspaper in Goa has observed that we need to start work on construction of a new bridge across Zuari river immediately, as the life span of the existing bridge gets over in two years.

In the same story they predict that the construction of the new bridge will take at least five years. Hence, in other words, (not in story), even if we were to start the work of constructing a new bridge now, we would have no bridge for three years!

It blames the government for sleeping on the problem and pats itself on the back for being far-sighted. Of course, it conveniently does not mention that they didn’t think of this story three years ago!

For, if the construction of a new bridge does take five years, the best time to start the work is five years before the life span of the existing bridge ends, isn’t it?

Rather, it’s Wednesday headlines read “Construction of new Zuari bridge must begin now” and continues in the same vein for the rest of the week publishing letters from readers commending it on taking up on the issue.

Everybody knows we need a new bridge across Zuari and everybody knew this several years ago. Every year, the present bridge is closed for a couple of days for inspection and occasionally minor repairs are taken up.

Heavy vehicles are not permitted on this bridge except for buses. The day the authorities stopped allowing heavy vehicles on the bridge, it became apparent that we needed a new bridge across Zuari.

The government hemmed and hawed pointing to the difficulties in constructing a bridge across the Zuari basin until somebody pointed to the Konkan Railway bridge standing solidly. The government then wondered aloud of a sea link from Vasco to Dona Paula until somebody pointed at the huge cost factor and asked who is going to pay for it.

Nobody pointed out that the Mandovi river has two bridges parallel to each other, and that it is quiet okay to have two parallel bridges to ease the traffic. Nobody mentioned that it is not necessary to start building a new bridge only when the first one collapses.

Nobody told them that we don’t need to look at Worli and anywhere else to decide whether to have two bridges across a river. We have two on the Mandovi and we know we need those two bridges,so it is all right to have two across Zuari for we need two bridges across Zuari.

Everybody knows that.