India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi virtually inaugurated the Maitri Setu between India and Bangladesh on March 9. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina attended the event via videoconferencing. What's the Maitri Setu? Let's find out.
Bridge over the Feni
The Maitri Setu is a double-lane bridge built over the River Feni that flows between the Indian boundary in Tripura and the neighbouring Bangladesh. Originating in South Tripura district, the river flows through the Sabroom town before entering Bangladesh.
The bridge is 1.9 km long and links Sabroom in India with Ramgarh in Bangladesh, facilitating connectivity that is crucial for the socio-economic development of the people in the region. The name "Maitri Setu", meaning "Friendship Bridge", symbolises the growing bilateral ties between the two countries.
Significance
The construction of the bridge was carried out by the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd, a company owned by the Indian Government, at a cost of Rs. 133 crore. Work on the bridge, entirely funded by the Central Government, began in June 2017.
"The Gateway of Northeast" With the inauguration of the bridge, Tripura is expected to become "the Gateway of Northeast". Poised to boost trade and commerce between India and Bangladesh, the Maitri Setu will enable India's landlocked Northeast to access the Chittagong Port in Bangladesh, which is 80 km from Sabroom, by road. This will also help other states in the region such as Assam, Manipur, and Mizoram to grow and explore the untapped markets across the borders.
Improving transport connectivity between the countries is expected to improve bilateral exports. The Maitri Setu will be the fastest land route from Sabroom to the Bangladesh Port. The bridge also makes Agartala, capital of Tripura, the first Indian city located closest to an international sea port.
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When the wind blows across an open area of water it causes waves. You can see this on the edge of lakes and ponds as well as the sea-shore, calm weather when winds are light, the waves are small. As winds strengthen, the waves grow larger. In stormy weather huge waves build up over hundreds of miles of ocean and eventually crash against the shore with terrifying force. But no matter how strong a wind is, the water itself does not move - the waves pass through it. In 1933 an American ship crossing the Pacific Ocean during a hurricane recorded a wave that measured thirty-four metres from its crest at the top to the trough at the bottom.
Huge as this is, earthquakes have produced even larger waves. These are called tsunamis, the Japanese for harbour waves'. Tsunamis are low waves that travel very fast - up to 790 kilometres per hour - across the ocean until they approach the shallow waters near land. There they grow much higher. In 1771 a tsunami estimated to be eighty-five metres high appeared off the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan. The force of the wave was so great that it threw a boulder weighing 750 tonnes more than two and a half kilometres!
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At the moment it is estimated that 15,600,000 square kilometres of the land surface on earth is covered by ice all year round. That is 10.5 per cent of the world's total land area.
This has not always been the case. No one knows for certain what happened to the earth's climate tens of thousands of years ago. But as recently as 10,000 years ago it is likely that the earth was coming out of an ice age. The planet's weather had been so cold for so long that most of northern Europe looked the same as Antarctica does today. In the UK ice sheets spread as far south as the River Thames, and the sites of lots of the main cities of northern Europe like Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm were buried under hundreds of metres of ice. No wonder the mammoths that wandered over northern Europe at that time needed warm woolly coats.
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