Vidyasagar Setu

Vidyasagar Setu — the Second Hooghly Bridge — was India's longest cable-stayed bridge at the time of opening in 1992 and remained so for nearly two decades. The bridge connects Kolkata to Howrah parallel to and 1.5 km south of the older Howrah Bridge, providing decongestion for the city's chronic east-west traffic.

Construction began in 1979 but progressed slowly through the 1980s due to design challenges and contractor changes. The Hooghly River Bridge Commissioners (HRBC) ultimately delivered the bridge at ₹388 crore — well over its original ₹140 crore estimate. The cable-stayed system uses 121 multi-strand stay cables (parallel-strand 7 mm wire HDG) arranged in a fan pattern.

The bridge carries six lanes of traffic plus two pedestrian/cycle paths. Wind tunnel testing at the National Physical Laboratory (UK) confirmed the deck's stability under cyclonic wind speeds up to 220 km/h. The H-shaped pylons rise 127.62 m above the deck — making them the tallest concrete pylons in India when constructed.

The bridge is named after Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the 19th-century Bengali polymath whose social reform work championed women's education in colonial Bengal. It was inaugurated by then-Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao on 10 October 1992.