Kolkata bridge collapse: Whose bridge is it anyway?

Nothing had prepared Kolkata for what it saw on Sunday morning. A 128-feet-wide chasm in the middle of the VIP Road-Ultadanga flyover, one that connects the vital artery of Kolkata, EM Bypass to the Kolkata Airport. A section of the bridge - a 156 tonne concrete slab- collapsed along with a truck on it on Sunday early morning. The flyover was as good as new - it has been only two years from the time it was commissioned in early 2011, when the Left Front government was on a slew of project inaugurations before the impending Assembly elections of 2011. [caption id=“attachment_647104” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The section of the bridge that has collapsed. PTI.[/caption] And not surprisingly the issue has become a political one with the two biggest political parties in the state choosing to trade charges over who was responsible for the collapse. The Times of India reported urban development minister Firhad Hakim as saying, “The flyover was thrown open in a hurry. It was the fault of the previous government. Proper action will be taken against those found guilty.” Not to be outdone, the Left was quick to catch up in the blame game and took a dig at the present government. Ashok Bhattacharya, the former urban development minister from CPI(M), told The Times of India ,“Sunday’s incident shows that there should be a regular inspection of all the flyovers. Unless the authority makes it a routine exercise, even a foolproof system can fail.” It was the Left-led state government who had appointed Mackintosh Burn Limited – a 179-year-old company – as the construction agency for the project after auctions threw up rates that were too steep, reports The Telegraph. Companies normally can be appointed for projects out of turn when the state holds a majority stake in the firm, but Mackintosh Burn was acquired by the state government only in 2010, two years after they were given the contract. The Left may be on shaky ground by blaming the Trinamool Congress for not authorising any inspection - the Firhad Hakim commission did an inquiry into the flyover’s declining structural health in 2011, according to a Telegraph report . However, the inspection was restricted to the piers and they were found to be in good condition barring a few minor cracks in a few places. Such logic is however alien to the culture of West Bengal, where it is easy to restrict yourself to the polemic of “CPM and Trinamool”. Any and every incident ranging from a murder, to students asking questions on a TV show, to the collapse of a flyover gets investigated and explained based on which side of the fence you are sitting on. Chances are that the Hakim commission’s voice will be drowned in the audio-visual tirade of the Left Front leaders eager enough to lay the blame on TMC - thus lending Mamata’s dissenters yet another stick to beat her with. If things go as they always do, the Trinamool will claim that Bengal, like the flyover, has collapsed during the 30-year Left rule. The real cause of the incident is still not clear, with experts from several engineering consultants being appointed for a detailed probe. Preliminary findings reveal that the section could have tumbled because of a faulty girder but that is still a matter of detailed investigation. (Read detailed technical reports here and here .) However, this swashbuckling duel of trying to match each other in blame games after every incident – whether  a market fire, political clash or infant deaths – that the TMC and Left in Bengal seem to have mastered, is tiring. The two parties act perhaps need to act maturely on some issues, at least in the case of disasters. Otherwise West Bengal’s future, just like this bridge, could be headed for collapse.