June 13: Residents of north Guwahati have urged the state government to construct a bridge over the Brahmaputra to connect it with the city centre.

At a meeting organised by the Silsako Mahila Samiti at A.K. Higher Secondary School recently, the participants decided to appeal to chief minister Tarun Gogoi to pressure the Centre into releasing funds for a survey on the feasibility of a bridge connecting north Guwahati with the city.

“The Saraighat bridge over the Brahmaputra, connecting Jalukbari with Amingaon, does not help north Guwahati. To develop this area as a satellite township of Guwahati, a bridge to north Guwahati is urgently required. This will also ease the population pressure on the city,” president of the Samiti I. Baruah said.

Baruah said the bridge would reduce the distance between Guwahati and the northern bank of the river and ensure speedy development of the area.

“The distance between Guwahati and north Guwahati is around 3 km, but in the absence of a bridge, the people of that area have to travel a lot more than that,” she added. Leading women’s organisations of north Guwahati said the bridge would benefit areas like Lenga, Bezera, Dumunichoki, Changsari and Baihata Chariali by reducing the distance of these places to Guwahati.

“Though north Guwahati is only a few km from the city centre, many localities in that area have not seen the light of development,” Baruah rued.

She pointed out that whatever growth has taken place, it was concentrated near the Saraighat bridge in Amingaon, while the other areas on the northern bank remained underdeveloped.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Export Promotion Industrial Park and other industrial units, including an LPG bottling plant, had been set up in Amingaon recently, but nothing much had happened in the other areas of the northern bank because of communication bottlenecks.

“At present, Guwahati has a population of around 15 lakh and to avoid a chaotic situation in a city that is surrounded by hills, tangible measures like shifting the population to the adjoining areas need to be worked out,” Dhiren Baruah of Save Guwahati, Build Guwahati said.

The NGO representative said to ease the pressure on Guwahati, a bridge over the Brahmaputra in the northern part of the city was necessary to develop the area as a satellite township as envisaged in the city masterplan.

Baruah said this would put a halt to unplanned construction, which was fast eating into the open spaces.