Abstract

Many of tomorrow’s megastructures will be built in India as the nation’s transformative economic growth

continues. Today the 117 million people of the north-eastern state of Bihar are benefiting from a new link

provided by the Veer Kunwar Singh Bridge across the Ganges River. Prior to the bridge completion, this

region, a vast and populous river plane with India’s lowest per capita income, had just six year-round road

lanes on three bridges over this 400km stretch of river. Upon inauguration in 2017, this four-lane bridge

became the world’s longest extradosed bridge, while also representing an evolution of bridge technology

and construction processes in Bihar.

This case study describes the design and construction of the 4.35km bridge, which comprises central

extradosed spans covering a 1920m-wide navigational channel. For the 16 extradosed pier units, a stay cable

system was used to carry the superstructure self-weight, permitting the use of a relatively shallow 3.4m

constant-depth superstructure for the 120m-long spans. This allowed the box girder to be composed of

precast segments, which could be erected much more rapidly and easily than the typical in-situ concrete

construction used on previous Ganges bridges. Historically, major bridges in India have taken over a decade

to complete, but the Veer Kunwar Singh was completed in only five years thanks to both the design-build

procurement process and the extradosed design, which was optimised for accelerated construction through

collaboration between the constructor and design engineer.

Keywords: Extradosed bridges; multi-span bridges; cables; balanced cantilever construction.