Bandra Worli Sealink - Inaugurated by Sonia Gandhi today June 30

The Bandra-Worli sea link, which was inaugurated by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi here today, will be named as 'Rajiv Gandhi Setu'.

After 10 years of expectations , delays and, of course, hardcore planning and labour, the spectacular Bandra-Worli Sea Link is set to

open at midnight on Tuesday. Come Wednesday morning and a new day will dawn for Mumbai's rush-hour motorists, with the Rs 750-crore link offering a new route between the island city and the western suburbs. Till now, the Mahim Causeway was the only route.

The Rs 1,600 crore (Rs 16 billion), 5.6-km Bandra-Worli Sea Link (BWSL), India's first open eight-lane, cable-supported sea bridge that will reduce traffic congestion in this metro, will be inaugurated by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday, an official said.

The BWSL inauguration will be held at the northern end of the sea bridge which joins Worli in south Mumbai with Bandra in north Mumbai, the official told IANS.

But as the bridge opens on Tuesday, to ease the bottleneck of honking cars, lorries and motorbikes on the mainland, there are hopes, too, that as well as showing off India's engineering prowess, it can inspire other projects elsewhere.

"Undoubtedly the Bandra-Worli Sea Link is an engineering marvel which shows that Indian construction players have come of age, and are capable of matching global counterparts," said Hitesh Agrawal, head of research with Angel Broking.

"However, the government needs to look into critical issues to ensure infrastructure projects are not delayed," he told AFP.

India's infrastructure is in desperate need of an overhaul but road, rail, airport and power schemes have often been delayed by tortuous state bureaucracy, a lack of private sector funding and land ownership disputes.

That honour goes now to the half-kilo-metre main span of the Bandra-Worli Sealink in Mumbai, an eight-lane, cable-stayed structure almost six kilometres long in all — which is already, like its older sibling in Kolkata, the site of police arrests of young bikers for illicit racing.

Yet Vidyasagar Setu is not just an example, but also a cautionary tale. Traffic across its elegant eight lanes never met original estimates, because approach roads were problematic. This should give the Sealink’s designers pause — their internal estimates are for 80 per cent of the Causeway’s traffic, which may be an overestimation. Cars might well speed across the 6 km to pile up in an almighty mess at Peddar Road, where locals anxious to safeguard their sky-high property values are stoutly opposed to the construction of a flyover to aid commuting.