ABSTRACT
Indian Road Congress (IRC) in early nineties realized the importance of Bridge management and constituted the B10 committee. B10 committee published some documents of which IRC Special Publication (SP 35) titled “Guidelines of Inspection and maintenance of Bridges” was one of them.
In the introduction part the committee stated that the publication of the guidelines will assist in improving the understanding of the bridge structure and their long term durability and serviceability. IRC SP 35 quotes “Lack of regular maintenance of bridges in India has led to deterioration of some bridges rather early in their life and quite a few bridges have had to be replaced much earlier than their designed life”.
It has been 24 years since IRC SP 35 was published, yet no major efforts have been made in implementation and defining the Bridge Management System (BMS) in India. The authors through extensive research have compiled a manual titled “Bridge Asset Management Program” (BAMP) which was accorded a copyright in 2015 by the Indian Government. Government of India (GOI) initiated a program to implement the BMS in India. The work envisages compilation of Inventory and implementation of BMS on National Highways. Ministry of Road, Transport and Highway (MORTH) is implementing this system by selecting two sets of consultants. First set of consultants (Single Consultant) is responsible for development of Indian BMS system (IBMS) for National Highways in India and the second set of consultants (18 nos) to complete the field work of collecting information for inventory of bridges and their condition status study for a period of three years. BMS in India is likely to complete its first cycle of inventory assimilation by March 2016.
The paper outlines the procedure suggested by the authors in IBMS for classification of bridges. Inventory parameters, rating relations, inspection procedures to be followed estimation parameters for rehabilitation along with priority and ranking system are discussed in this paper subsequently.
The authors estimate that over 50,000 structures will need to be inspected and that ranking and priority procedure of IBMS will have to account the possible scenario of large number of bridges showing distress. Large numbers of bridges which have not been regularly maintained pose a challenge in a very restrictive budget.
