The ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) is separating bridge monitoring from highway contracts and handing it to specialized agencies in a bid to detect structural deterioration early and reduce the risk of bridge collapses. The ministry wants to create an independent monitoring system for India’s expanding bridge network, with tighter accountability for structural safety.
Why is the ministry changing the way bridges are monitored?
Bridge monitoring has traditionally been embedded within highway construction, operation or maintenance contracts. MoRTH’s new approach seeks to create a more independent system, where specialized agencies monitor the condition of bridges rather than leave the function with entities responsible for building or maintaining highways.
The specialized agency will handle sensors, hardware, data acquisition, transmission, reporting, operation and maintenance. The analytical software will be developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in collaboration with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
How will continuous monitoring help in bridge maintenance?
Continuous monitoring can provide a much richer picture of a bridge’s condition than periodic visual inspection. Sensors can detect changes in parameters such as movement, vibration, strain and other structural responses. Centralized analytics can identify abnormal patterns and potentially flag deterioration before visible damage becomes critical.
Dey said continuous access to asset-condition data can help authorities build deterioration forecasts and make preventive interventions more timely than relying only on infrequent visual inspections. But he cautioned that “data by itself” will not make bridges safer unless it results in timely action. BHMS is an early-warning mechanism, not a substitute for engineering intervention, maintenance or structural repairs.
Is India’s recent bridge-collapse record behind the move?
The timing is significant. In a December 2025 Lok Sabha response, MoRTH acknowledged that highway structures can be damaged because of design flaws, non-compliance with standards and specifications, improper construction practices, as well as heavy rain, floods and landslides.
The ministry listed 17 bridge/flyover incidents on national highways during FY25 and FY26 up to December 2025. They included a newly constructed bridge in Jharkhand where a pier settled by 55 mm; damage to bridges in Jammu and Kashmir from flooding and scouring; the Old Kali bridge in Karnataka, and construction-stage girder failures in Kerala.
Several incidents also illustrate that failures can have very different causes. A Kerala NH-66 girder collapse in November 2025 was attributed to the failure of an authority engineer to review the efficacy of material used for launching and failure to ensure the approved launching scheme was followed. Another Kerala incident involved the collapse of four prestressed concrete girders during construction.
Outside the national highway system, the problem has been equally visible. The July 2025 Gambhira bridge collapse in Gujarat killed several people. A preliminary inquiry attributed the failure to crushing of the pedestal and articulation, while subsequent reporting raised concerns around ageing, maintenance and earlier warnings.
Does monitoring address poor design and construction quality?
Only partly. Sensors cannot correct a faulty design or compensate for the use of substandard materials. The bigger benefit is that systematic monitoring can reveal whether a structure is behaving differently from what was expected, allowing engineers to investigate before a catastrophic failure.
There is evidence that weaknesses in quality control can exist well before a failure. A Comptroller and Auditor General of India audit of bridge works in Odisha found poor or doubtful concrete quality at 38% of the locations tested by ultrasonic pulse velocity, while 25% of locations tested using rebound hammer had compressive strength below the required level.
A separate CAG audit of a Karmanasa river bridge found that poor-quality concrete, overloading and design faults contributed to damage and resulted in additional expenditure of ₹41.52 crore.
The message is that monitoring needs to work alongside stronger design review, material testing, construction supervision and maintenance.
What is the bridge-monitoring architecture that MoRTH is building?
BHMS is only part of the ministry’s broader digital bridge-management effort. MoRTH has developed the Indian Bridge Management System for inventory, inspection, condition assessment and management of bridges on national highways. It includes a bridge health index and a priority-and-ranking system to determine which structures require maintenance, rehabilitation or reconstruction.
The ministry has directed that all bridges with spans exceeding six metres on national highways be covered. Field units must upload inventory and condition data, while senior officials are required to conduct verification. Bridges longer than 500 metres will receive additional verification by regional officers. Drones and unmanned aerial systems can be used for inaccessible components.
Bhavik Vora, partner and transport and logistics industry leader at Grant Thornton Bharat, said separating bridge-health monitoring from construction and maintenance contracts represents an important shift towards technology-led asset management. He said AI-based monitoring, drones and digital analytics can complement continuous sensor-based monitoring, but stressed that the real test will be whether warnings are translated into maintenance and repair on the ground.
That may ultimately determine whether MoRTH’s new framework succeeds. The objective is not simply to know when a bridge is deteriorating, but to ensure that the warning arrives early enough—and with sufficient institutional accountability—to prevent failure.