The Padma Bridge is now a reality, a major step at knitting the country together. This bridge exists due to the determination and courage of the prime minister, who rejected the advice of all those who were against undertaking this task.
In this article, I will tell the story of the financing of the bridge from what I have learned and about the attitudes of the World Bank. Some of this is rather personal but I thought that with the success of the construction of the bridge I would tell you about the events as I saw them.
The program to build a bridge over the Padma River was not a light one. The length of the bridge was no problem, there are many bridges that are longer. There were two serious engineering problems:
First, the river may shift channel as it has done in the past; this can be managed by river training, essentially placing enough rock material on the banks upstream from the bridge to prevent the powerful erosion from the water flowing swiftly southward and pushing against the west bank due to the rotation of the Earth.
Second, the flow of the river carries a large amount of sediment. This sediment is pushed against the piers holding up the bridge and will erode the concrete of these piers.