Transport of Bihar: Railways, Roads and Ganga Bridges

The Ganga cuts Bihar in two, and the history of transport in the state is the history of getting across it. Until 1959 there was no bridge over the Ganga anywhere in Bihar and the north bank was reached by ferry; today a line of bridges from Buxar to Bhagalpur ties the two halves together, and examiners ask their names, their towns and their years more often than any other transport fact of the state. Around the bridges sit the railway zone with its headquarters at Hajipur, the Grand Trunk Road in the south, the East to West corridor in the north, two international airports and the oldest national waterway of the country. BPSC, BSSC, Bihar Police and railway papers draw questions from each of these.

Railways

The East Central Railway, created in 2002 when the railways were reorganised, has its headquarters at Hajipur in Vaishali district, the only zonal headquarters of the Indian Railways in Bihar. Its divisions are Danapur, Sonpur and Samastipur in Bihar, Dhanbad in Jharkhand and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, the old Mughalsarai, in Uttar Pradesh. The far north east of the state, around Katihar, falls in the Katihar division of the Northeast Frontier Railway, which is a favourite trap in matching questions.

• Patna Junction, Danapur, Mokama, Kiul, Jhajha, Barauni, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Samastipur and Katihar are the junctions that papers name.
• The Kosi Rail Mahasetu between Nirmali and Saraigarh, opened in 2020, restored the rail link across the Kosi that the earthquake of 1934 had broken.
• The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor runs through the south of the state, with Sonnagar in Rohtas district as one of its marked points.

The bridges over the Ganga

Rajendra Setu at Mokama was inaugurated by Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, and it carried both a railway line and a road, the first bridge on the Ganga in the country to do so. The Mahatma Gandhi Setu between Patna and Hajipur, nearly six kilometres long, was for years the longest river bridge in India and remains the lifeline between the capital and the north bank; its superstructure has since been rebuilt in steel. Further east, Vikramshila Setu carries the traffic of Bhagalpur across to Naugachhia. The Son, the other great river of the south, is crossed at Koilwar by a rail cum road bridge of the eighteen sixties, now named after Abdul Bari.

Roads and road transport

Two corridors carry most of the road traffic of Bihar. In the south, National Highway 19, the old National Highway 2 and the historic Grand Trunk Road, runs through Sasaram, Dehri, Aurangabad and on towards Dhanbad, and this stretch forms part of the Delhi to Kolkata arm of the Golden Quadrilateral. In the north, National Highway 27, the East to West corridor, runs from the Uttar Pradesh border through Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga and Purnia towards Bengal, and it is the road that opened up the Mithila and Seemanchal districts. The Bihar State Road Transport Corporation, set up in 1959, runs the state’s buses, and the Bihar State Road Development Corporation builds the state highways.

Air and water

Bihar has two international airports. The Jayaprakash Narayan Airport at Patna is the main one, and Gaya International Airport, built for the Buddhist circuit of Bodh Gaya, receives direct flights from Buddhist countries, which is why it carries the international label although it is small. Darbhanga Airport, opened for civil flights in 2020 under the regional connectivity scheme, serves north Bihar, and there is an Air Force station at Bihta near Patna.

• National Waterway 1, the Ganga from Haldia to Prayagraj, is 1,620 kilometres long and was the first national waterway of India, declared in 1986; the long Bihar stretch runs past Buxar, Patna, Munger and Bhagalpur.
• The Jal Marg Vikas Project, with assistance from the World Bank, deepened this waterway and built terminals, among them the multimodal terminal at Patna, so that containers can move by river between Bihar and the sea at Haldia.
• The Gandak, the Kosi and the Sone are used for local boat traffic, and the ferry across the Ganga still works at many points where no bridge stands.

Read together, the chapter has a shape worth holding in memory: one zonal headquarters at Hajipur, one trunk road in the south and one in the north, two international airports, one national waterway and a chain of bridges in which 1959, 1982 and 2001 are the three years that matter most.