Over 100 bridges on the verge of collapse: Minister

Over 100 bridges in different parts of the country are on the verge of collapse and need immediate attention, road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari said on Thursday.

He added that his ministry completed a safety audit of 1.6 lakh bridges in the country.

“100 bridges can be collapse anytime and they need immediate attention,” he said.

He also referred to a tragedy where two state-run buses and other vehicles were swept away after a British-era bridge over the Savitri river in Maharashtra collapsed last year.

Gadakari said his ministry had launched a special project to create data for all bridges and culverts in the country.

Referring to the delays in works on various road projects, the minister said issues related to land acquisition, encroachment and environmental clearances were cropping up.

Punjabi is among the top three immigrant languages spoken in Canada, while Hindi has been among the fastest growing immigrant languages over the past five years, data from the country’s census has shown.

Canada defines immigrant languages as those whose presence in the country is originally due to immigration, besides its two official languages — English and French.

“Linguistic diversity is on the rise in Canada. Close to 7.6 million Canadians reported speaking a language other than English or French at home in 2016, an increase of almost one million (14.5%) over 2011,” a release from government agency StatCan stated, based on the 2016 census.

Among those that consider an immigrant language as their mother tongue and speak it at home, Punjabi ranked just below Mandarin and Cantonese. In the 2011 Census, Punjabi was the second most-spoken immigrant language since the two Chinese languages were taken as one unit for that assessment.

The number of Punjabi-speakers has increased by just over 18%, and the total is at 568,375 people. Hindi is among the languages that has “experienced the largest increases”, with speakers numbering nearly 175,000.

Among other Indian languages, the Gujarati-speaking population has gone up by nearly 21%. Tamil is another Indian language in the list of the top 22 immigrant tongues, but has seen a smaller increase — about 10%.

Speaking to HT, Bonny Norton, professor and distinguished university scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, described the rise in the Hindi-speaking population as “particularly notable”.

The data released confined itself to immigrant languages that had at least 100,000 speakers. No figures were available for other Indian languages with a noticeable presence in Canada, including Bengali, Telugu and Konkani.