Is it time to think of a Ram Setu Express?
As far as railway bridges go, you could call it short—spanning only 2.2 km. As India was marking its Constitution Day this week, rail safety commissioner A M Chowdhary quietly authorised the opening of a reconstructed Pamban bridge between Mandapam and Pamban stations in Tamil Nadu. Built at a cost of about Rs 550 crore, India's first vertical lift bridge, an engineering marvel, will connect Rameshwaram with mainland India and enable a speed of 80 km per hour across the bridge. For me, this brought back memories of a midnight ceremony at St Petersburg, Russia on the margins of a G20 summit, when I saw a road bridge across a river rise up and split from the middle to allow ships to pass through. Engineering has come a long way, and the Pamban bridge represents a potential that India can exploit in the not-too-distant future to probably build a high-speed rail link between India and Sri Lanka.
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