Unique Engineering Behind the Bandra-Worli Sea Link Bridge

The bridge weights the equivalent of 50,000 African elephants, and the wires used are equivalent to the circumference of the earth.

The Bandra-Worli Sea Link is one of India’s major marvels of engineering. It was the first bridge to be constructed in open-sea conditions in the region, marking the beginning of a period of engineering achievement for India.

During peak construction, around 4000 workers and 150 engineers were involved in the building of this bridge. Between 2001 and 2009, the main years of the bridge’s construction, around 25.7 million work hours were put into building the eight-lane highway and cable-stayed bridge.

Prior to the bridge’s construction, the Mahim causeway was the only road that connected Bandra and the western suburbs of Mumbai to Worli and central Mumbai. This meant that all traffic across the Bandra Channel had to use the congested Mahim Causeway, which became a bottleneck for more than 140,000 commuters each day.

This resulted in terrible congestion and it could take more than an hour to cover the 4,9 miles (8 km) distance.