08/06/2025
Gali Madhavi Latha - The civil engineer behind the Chenab Bridge Project
_"I’m happy to have been part of a project to realise a century-old dream" said the rock mechanics specialist and professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, and a consultant for the Chenab Bridge project._
Gali Madhavi Latha studied civil engineering at NIT Warangal and obtained a PhD. from IIT Madras before joining the IISc. She was the assistant professor there when Afcon recruited her in 2005 as a project consultant.
She has lost count of how often the mountain slopes flanking the Chenab river sprang hidden surprises, forcing her team into real-time redesigns as they wrestled to build the world’s highest railway arch bridge. Through their 17 years on the project, she and her team embraced a “design-as-you-go” philosophy to build the 1,315m steel bridge, 359m above the Chenab. She had first surveyed the site in 2005 after a boat ride along the Chenab and a grueling climb up the steep mountain slopes on foot. That was 17 years before the construction was completed in 2022, with the last 4 years spent on trial runs.
The bridge required some 28,660 tonnes of steel - equivalent to nearly 4 Eiffel Towers - plus 66,000 cubic meters of concrete and 26km of motorable roads to bring in cranes, other equipment and workers. Designed to last 120 years and handle train speeds up to 100kmph, the bridge can remain operational at 30kmph even if one of its eight piers fails! Multiple times during the construction, the engineering teams had to adopt design strategies, solutions, and sequences of construction that, she said, were not available in any textbooks or construction codes.
At the end of it all, she is just happy to see the project successfully completed. Just as a matter of fact. Nothing more.
Courtesy*
