Howrah Bridge

Howrah Bridge
Night view of the Howrah Bridge
Coordinates	22°35′06″N 88°20′49″E / 22.5851°N 88.3469°E / 22.5851; 88.3469
Carries	4 lanes[1] of Strand Road,[2] pedestrians and bicycles
Crosses	Hooghly River (Ganga River)[3]
Locale	Howrah and Kolkata[3]
Official name	Howrah Bridge
Other name(s)	Gateway of Kolkata Grand Old Lady of Calcutta
Maintained by	Kolkata Port Trust[4]
Characteristics
Design	Suspension type Steel bridge[5] and truss arch[6]
Material	Steel
Total length	705 m (2,313.0 ft)[7][8]
Width	71 ft (21.6 m) with two footpaths of 15 ft (4.6 m) on either side[5]
Height	82 m (269.0 ft)[6]
Longest span	1,500 ft (457.2 m)[5][6]
Clearance above	5.8 m (19.0 ft)[5]
Clearance below	8.8 m (28.9 ft)[5]
History
Designer	M/s. Rendel, Palmer and Tritton[9]
Constructed by	Braithwaite, Burn & Jessop Construction Company
Construction start	1936 (1936)[9]
Construction end	1942 (1942)[9]
Opened	3 February 1943; 81 years ago (3 February 1943)[8]
Statistics
Daily traffic	100,000 vehicles and 150,000 pedestrians[10]
Toll	Toll-Free on both ways
Location

The Howrah Bridge is a balanced steel bridge over the Hooghly River in West Bengal, India. Commissioned in 1943,^[9][11] the bridge was originally named the New Howrah Bridge, because it replaced a pontoon bridge at the same location linking the twin cities of Howrah and Kolkata, which are located at the opposite banks of each other. On 14 June 1965, it was renamed Rabindra Setu after the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Indian and Asian Nobel laureate.^[11] It is still popularly known as the Howrah Bridge.

The bridge is one of four on the Hooghly River and is a famous symbol of Kolkata and West Bengal. The other bridges are the Vidyasagar Setu (popularly called the Second Hooghly Bridge), the Vivekananda Setu and the relatively new Nivedita Setu. It carries a daily traffic of approximately 100,000 vehicles^[12] and possibly more than 150,000 pedestrians,^[10] easily making it the busiest cantilever bridge in the world.^[13] The third-longest cantilever bridge at the time of its construction,^[14] the Howrah Bridge is currently the sixth-longest bridge of its type in the world.^[15]