Atal Setu: A Magnificent Bridge in Search of Traffic

pseshkumar

2 weeks ago

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By P. SESH KUMAR

India’s challenge is no longer whether it can build infrastructure. The challenge is ensuring every kilometre delivers lasting economic value through better planning, maintenance, utilisation and accountability.

New Delhi, August 8, 2026 — On 12 January 2024 the Prime Minister inaugurated the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Sewri-Nhava Sheva Atal Setu, 21.8 kilometres from Sewri to Chirle, of which 16.5 kilometres cross open water–India’s longest bridge, built by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for about Rs 17,840 crore. Six lanes, grade-separated, a genuine feat of marine engineering, and a travel time between Mumbai and Navi Mumbai cut to minutes.

The business case has not followed the engineering. In its first year the bridge carried 83,06,009 vehicles, an average of 22,689 a day, against an MMRDA projection of 57,525 a day by 2021 and 88,550 by 2031. Its highest single day was 61,807 vehicles–on 14 January 2024, two days after opening, when curiosity was the traffic.27 A reply under the Right to Information Act showed a gap of about seventy per cent between projection and actual use, with roughly 24,000 vehicles a day in August 2024 against a 2021 projection of 89,463; toll collections nonetheless rose about eighty per cent between January and August 2024, from Rs 8.68 crore to Rs 15.76 crore, driven by heavy commercial vehicles.

The activist who obtained the data argued for a 40 per cent cut in the car toll and exemption for taxis and cab services, on the view that a Rs 250 single and Rs 375 return journey rations the bridge to the wealthy and to freight.28 By March 2026, two crore cumulative crossings over 26 months worked out to about 25,478 a day–still under half the original forecast, though the trend is upward.29

This is the classic value-for-money failure, and it is a subtler failure than corruption. Nothing was stolen. The bridge is well built and is being properly operated.

But a Rs 17,840 crore asset generating a fraction of its forecast utilisation means one of three things: the traffic model was wrong, the toll is set above the demand curve, or the complementary development that was to fill the bridge — Navi Mumbai airport, the growth corridor beyond Chirle–has not yet arrived. Probably all three.

The honest response is not to defend the forecast but to publish the post-completion traffic review, restate the economic internal rate of return on actual data, and treat the toll as a demand-management variable rather than a debt-service constant.

India builds elaborate ex-ante appraisals and almost never publishes ex-post ones. Until it does, every forecast is a promise no one is required to keep.

The bridge also supplied the season’s political theatre. In June 2024, five months after inauguration, cracks were photographed and the Maharashtra Congress president alleged corruption and a road caved in by a foot over half a kilometre.

MMRDA responded that the cracks were on the approach road from Ulwe and not on the bridge; that an operation-and-maintenance inspection on 20 June had found minor cracks at three locations on the asphalt of Ramp 5; that they were longitudinal edge cracks with no structural cause, repairable without affecting pavement life; and that Strabag, the contractor for Package 4, would complete repairs within twenty-four hours without disrupting traffic.

MMRDA was, so far as the public record goes, technically right–and its handling of the episode, with a same-week inspection record, a named contractor and a stated defect classification, was better than most Indian agencies manage.

The lesson is not about the bridge. It is that in the absence of any routine, published, third-party condition reporting, every photograph becomes an allegation and every rebuttal becomes a denial. Agencies that publish nothing between ribbon-cutting and scandal have no vocabulary in which to be believed.

The Coastal Corridor: Leaks, Joints and a 405 Per Cent Question

Mumbai’s Coastal Road–formally the Dharmveer Swarajya Rakshak Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Marg–is the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) own money, its own project and its own reckoning.

Phase I, 10.58 kilometres from Marine Drive to the Worli end of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, includes India’s first undersea road tunnels, driven by a 12.19-metre boring machine beneath Malabar Hill, on reclaimed land, financed largely out of municipal revenues and development premia rather than borrowing.

Conceived in 2010, begun in October 2018 after eight years of litigation and study, opened southbound in March 2024 and northbound that July.

On 26 May 2024, eight weeks after the southbound tunnel opened, water was seen dripping from the roof, with damp walls and paint chipping off. The chief engineer said the dampness was coming through construction joints, that the cause was not yet established because traffic ran until eleven at night, and that grouting would be used to arrest it. There was heavy water logging a hundred metres before the Marine Drive exit.

The Chief Minister inspected the site, said leakage was at two or three places through pre-determined expansion joints, that there was no threat to the structure, and suggested polymer grouting on all twenty-five joints on each side before the monsoon.32 33 BMC’s position was that expansion joints are provided every twenty to thirty metres precisely to accommodate contraction and expansion and preserve the integrity of large concrete sections, that water was permeating through them, and that injection grouting had sealed it; the contractor, L&T, was directed to inspect all remaining joints, and the additional municipal commissioner said a comprehensive examination was under way for a permanent solution while structural integrity remained intact.

Let us take that defence seriously, because it is broadly sound engineering. Expansion joints in an immersed or bored tunnel under a marine water table are designed weak points; seepage through them is a waterproofing and grouting failure, not a structural one; and grouting is the standard remedy.

What the defence does not answer is why a tunnel commissioned in March required emergency joint grouting in May, before its first monsoon, on a project whose entire novelty was that it ran under the sea. Waterproofing at the joints was not an unforeseeable contingency. It was the single most foreseeable risk in the design brief.

Nor was the tunnel the only complaint. By September 2024, within two months of the northbound carriageway opening from Chowpatty to Worli, commuters reported a surface so uneven that it rode like a fairground. BMC stated that there were no cracks, potholes or structural deficiencies and that the uneven patches were a deliberately applied mastic layer protecting the asphalt through the monsoon; critics observed that the need for a protective mastic layer within a month of opening was itself an admission about the quality of what lay beneath, and that a patch which does not match the road level defeats its own purpose. Both readings can be defended. What cannot be defended is that the public has no independent pavement-condition report against which to choose between them.

Then the money, which is where the auditor’s pencil goes. A CAG/Principal Accountant General PAG) inspection report submitted to BMC in July 2021, covering April 2016 to March 2020, questioned the escalation of the project’s cost from Rs 252 crore a kilometre in 2011 to Rs 304 crore in 2016, Rs 686 crore in 2018 and Rs 1,274 crore– a rise of 405 per cent– and recorded that the huge variation needed justification.

Of Rs 2,100 crore of expenditure examined, about Rs 200 crore was called into question, covering final payments, non-recovery of penalties, non-receipt of interest and additional payments to contractors and consultants, including Rs 142 crore paid to contractors between July and December 2019 during a period when the Bombay High Court had stayed the work.

BMC submitted justifications; the outcome was awaited. I must flag this carefully: that inspection report was not made public, and the account of it in the public domain rests on a single newspaper’s access to a copy. It is a serious source and internally coherent, but it is one source, and it is an inspection report rather than a CAG report under Article 151.

A second and more recent audit intervention is on the record. Another similar PAG report issued in July 2024 to BMC’s chief engineer, reported in April 2025, flagged a cost escalation of Rs 922 crore attributable to an unjustified design change made in December 2022–the widening of the span between two piers of the interchange bridge connecting the Coastal Road to the Bandra-Worli Sea Link from 60 metres to a 120, to allow fishing boats from Worli Koliwada’s Cleveland Bunder safe passage, which required an expensive bow-string structure.

Audit’s reasoning was that the widening was not justified because expert opinion had differed from time to time. Separately, delays attributable to BMC since 2018 are reported to have produced an overrun of about Rs 1,243 crore on Phase I, with penalties imposed on the contractor, and the project’s cost has been put at over Rs 14,000 crore against initial estimates near Rs 12,000 crore.38 These too are single-source or draft-stage findings and I mark them as such.

The bow-string finding is worth dwelling on, because it is where audit is at its most vulnerable. The design change was made to protect the livelihood of a fishing community whose access to the sea the reclamation had constricted. Audit priced that accommodation at Rs 922 crore and found it unjustified on the ground that experts had disagreed.

But a decision taken to preserve the traditional access of an artisanal fishery is a distributional choice, not an engineering error, and “experts differed” is a description of most public decisions worth making. The right audit question was whether the choice was made transparently, with the cost quantified in advance and placed before the deciding authority–not whether it should have been made at all.

When audit crosses from process to substance without saying so, it hands the audited body an easy escape and lends colour to the charge that auditors second-guess policy. This, incidentally, is exactly the charge levelled against performance audit in general, and the reason the discipline must be scrupulous about where its writ ends.