Howrah Bridge Opened on 3 February 1943 With a 1,500-Foot Main Span, and 23,500 of Its 26,500 Tonnes of Steel Came From Tata Steel and Were Fabricated in Calcutta

Howrah Bridge, officially called Rabindra Setu since 14 June 1965, was opened across the Hooghly River between Calcutta and Howrah on 3 February 1943. Its main span measures 1,500 feet (about 457 metres) between the two towers, according to The Engineer’s review of civil engineering in 1943, published on 14 January 1944. Of the 26,500 tonnes of permanent steelwork, about 23,500 tonnes were supplied by the Tata Iron and Steel Company at Jamshedpur and fabricated in four Calcutta workshops by the Braithwaite, Burn and Jessop Construction Company (BBJ), according to the engineers’ paper as Tata Steel’s 2018 commemorative book quotes it. That is 88.7 per cent of the steel by weight.

The consulting engineers were Rendel, Palmer and Tritton of Westminster, London. The main contractor was the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company of Darlington, England. The Indian share was the steel, the fabrication shops and the labour on site, from riveters to crane drivers. More than 100,000 vehicles and about 150,000 pedestrians use the bridge every day, according to reports on the port’s 2024 health check.

The numbers: a 1,500-foot span between towers

A cantilever bridge grows outward from its towers, with each arm held in balance by an anchor arm behind it. Howrah Bridge has two towers about 82 metres high (270 feet above the roadway, The Engineer wrote in 1938). Each cantilever arm is 468 feet long, and together they carry a suspended span of 564 feet between them. Each anchor arm is 325 feet long. The 1944 review puts the roadway at 71 feet (about 21.6 metres) wide, with two footways of 15 feet each.

The roadway deck hangs from the main trusses on 39 pairs of hangers, according to Tata Steel’s book. Deccan Chronicle counted the same structure in 2024 as 78 hangers. Structurae, the engineering database, gives the main span as 457.50 metres and the side spans as 99.125 metres. The metric figures match the feet-and-inches record to within about 30 centimetres.

Rankings depend on who is counting. The Engineer called it “the third largest cantilever bridge in the world” in January 1944. The Times of India described it in 2024 as the world’s sixth-longest cantilever bridge. The coffee-table book released at the 2018 anniversary function calls it the busiest cantilever bridge in the world, and the press release gives no ranking body for that claim.

Why a cantilever, and who chose it

The bridge replaced a floating bridge. Sir Bradford Leslie designed that pontoon bridge, built its parts in England, and had it open to traffic in October 1874. It was 1,528 feet long between abutments, with a 48-foot roadway, and cost 22 lakh rupees, according to the 1909 Howrah district gazetteer that Tata Steel’s book reproduces. A section in the middle had to be moved aside each time a ship passed.

Plans for a fixed crossing took decades. The 1909 gazetteer records a committee in 1855 and 1856 and an Act in 1871. A design competition in 1911 drew 18 designs from nine firms, and a bascule (lifting-span) design from Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nurnberg was ranked best, but the First World War stopped the scheme for the time being, the engineers A. M. Ward and E. Bateson wrote, as Tata’s book quotes them.

In 1921 an expert committee chaired by Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, an Indian engineer and industrialist, took up the question. Millennium Post writes that he recommended a cantilever against the wishes of his mentor Leslie, who favoured floating designs. Boloji gives 15 February 1922 as the date the committee’s report recommended a cantilever. The Commissioners for the new bridge were set up in 1922, and an Act of 1926 gave the project its legal footing. A fresh Act replaced it in 1935, according to The News Minute.

Rendel, Palmer and Tritton reported in 1929 on two alternatives, a cantilever and a floating bridge without an opening span. The report said that a layer of hard clay lay 97 feet below the surface on the Calcutta side and 79 feet on the Howrah side. The firm wrote that this “entirely revolutionises the previously held opinions” on how much load the ground near Calcutta could carry. The Engineer recorded in March 1930 an estimated cost of 2,650,000 pounds for the cantilever against 1,530,000 pounds for the floating bridge.

The tender that put Indian steel into the contract

Tender documents were issued in December 1934, and bids closed on 30 April 1935. Four firms bid: three in London (one English, one Scottish, one German) and a combine of three Indian structural firms in Calcutta, BBJ. For the full official design the prices ran from about Rs 2.1 crore to Rs 2.3 crore, and the German bid was the lowest. That bid was passed over, according to Ward and Bateson as Tata’s book reports, and Cleveland Bridge, the second lowest, was next in line.

At that point the case for Indian industry was made. Tata’s book says the Indian authorities insisted that a job of this size should use Indian steelmakers and fabricators where possible. Cleveland agreed to buy in India the structural steel it could get on reasonable terms. The firm won the contract in 1936 and managed the erection on site, with BBJ as subcontractor for the fabricated steel.

The paper that Hubert Shirley-Smith wrote with G. E. Howorth for the Institution of Civil Engineers (published May 1947, according to Structurae) spells out the split, as Tata’s book quotes it. About 23,500 tonnes of the permanent steelwork were sublet in India: supplied by Tata at Jamshedpur and fabricated by BBJ. The remaining 3,000 tonnes were made in England, including wide plates, the universal joints at the ends of the suspended span, the heavy pins and the hydraulic and screw jacks used to close the span. The creeper cranes and a further 2,500 tonnes of temporary steelwork also came from England.

Tiscrom: the steel Tata had to develop

The design specification allowed ordinary structural steel and a high-tensile grade with an ultimate tensile strength of 37 to 43 tons per square inch. Tata Steel’s book says the company had to start a research programme to produce the high-tensile steel to that specification. Tata Steel calls the result, named Tiscrom, India’s first high-tensile steel. The company’s research and control laboratory was formally inaugurated on 14 September 1937 by the chairman, Sir Nowroji Saklatvala, and Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the book records.

The book describes the problems the metallurgists met. Sections rolled differently from plain carbon steel, so the roll-pass designers changed the pass design. The steel formed a hard scale that stuck to the surface, which the mill crews broke off with high-pressure steam on every pass. The copper in the alloy caused surface cracking. Tata Steel also says it had to defend a patent suit and satisfy the consulting engineers before it was allowed to substitute for imported steel. These accounts come from Tata Steel’s own publication and are not independently checked here.

Tata Steel’s press release of 3 February 2018 gives the same totals: 26,500 tons of steel, of which 23,500 tons was Tiscrom. The company’s anniversary page says it made almost 90 per cent of the steel in the bridge. The Jamshedpur works grew out of plans Jamsetji Tata made before his death in 1904, covered in an earlier tuput article on Jamsetji Tata.

Raising it in wartime: foundations, rivets and a night opening

Work on site began in October 1936, according to The News Minute and Tata Steel’s book. Structurae also gives 1936 as the start, while SMP Kolkata’s December 2024 statement dates the construction to 1937 through 1942. The first job was sinking the foundations, which are monoliths (large hollow wells of steel and concrete, lowered by digging out the ground inside them). BBJ’s archives, as Tata’s book tells it, say the main monoliths measured about 180 by 81 feet and were sunk day and night at a foot or more a day, with 40 Indian crane drivers trained on the job working in three eight-hour shifts.

The same archives describe the labour force as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Pathans, including the skilled riveters, with most of the steel erection done by Punjabi and Bombay crews. British senior engineers and foremen supervised with Indian assistants.

The fabricators held member lengths to plus or minus 1/64 inch, and the steel tapes they used were certified by the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England. Shirley-Smith wrote that the eight members of the anchor arm’s lower chord, 325 feet in all, came out within 5/64 inch of the intended length. Members were assembled and checked at the Victoria Works in Garden Reach, Calcutta. Deck girders weighing 22 tons each were riveted on pontoons and hoisted into place by hand winches, and the deck steel was assembled within three months of the span closing. The deck troughs involved more than one million spot welds. By the end of 1942 the steelwork was up and the roadways were ready, Tata Steel’s book says.

The bridge opened in the middle of the war. A tram went across from the city end to the station end in the night of 3 February 1943, according to Tata Steel’s book, and ETV Bharat and Boloji also report a tram as the first traffic. The port commissioners’ registers did not log an entry, the book says, and The Engineer’s review of the year said wartime censorship limited how much it could report on civil engineering work. Tata’s book recounts Japanese air raids on Calcutta on 20 December 1942, citing The Statesman. The port chairman, Vinit Kumar, said in 2018 that the bridge was unveiled “primarily to aid supplies to British troops”.

From Howrah Bridge to Rabindra Setu

The crossing was renamed Rabindra Setu on 14 June 1965, after Rabindranath Tagore. Tata’s book gives the date, The News Minute gives the year, and both note that the old name has stayed in use. A second Hooghly crossing, the cable-stayed Vidyasagar Setu, opened in 1992, according to Tata’s book. The first vehicle on Howrah Bridge was a tram, and the Kolkata trams article covers the lines that were linked across it.

The port that has looked after the bridge since 1943 was the Kolkata Port Trust and is now Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port (SMP Kolkata), PTI reports. Tata’s book puts average annual engineering maintenance at Rs 2.5 crore in 2013 to 2016.

Keeping it up: a ship strike in 2005 and a health check in 2024

On 24 June 2005 the funnel of a cargo vessel, the MV Mani, jammed under the bridge at high tide for three hours. The News Minute and Tata’s book report damage of Rs 15 million to the bridge’s stringer and longitudinal girder, along with broken cross girders. The port asked the original consultants for help, used about 8 tonnes of steel in the repair, and finished in early 2006, according to the book. A 2011 port inspection found that spitting had worn down the steel hoods that protect the hanger bases from about 6 millimetres to under 3 millimetres since 2007, The News Minute reports. The port announced a fibreglass casing for the hoods.

The bridge’s most recent full check began in February 2023, when SMP Kolkata started a health check with RITES, a railways consultancy, PTI reports. The port closed the bridge to vehicles from 11:30 pm on 16 November 2024 to 4:30 am on 17 November. Inspectors examined the hangers, the deck slabs and the bituminous road surface, Deccan Chronicle reports. The Times of India says it was the first such audit since the 1980s. RITES had done the last one from 1983 to 1988, after 40 years of service, and its recommendations of ultrasonic and non-destructive tests, restoration and retrofitting were carried out in the following years.

Rendel, formerly Rendel, Palmer and Tritton, joined the inspection on 3 December 2024 with two engineers, Michael J. King and Omar Nabeel. The port said the condition assessment report, vetted by Rendel, could be submitted in the first quarter of 2025, and that RITES would then propose a repair and rehabilitation scheme. As of 29 October 2026, tuput found no published findings from the report.