Major Road Bridges of Nepal: Longest Spans and River Crossings

Road bridges in Nepal are planned, built and maintained primarily by the Department of Roads (DoR) under the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, whose Bridge Branch keeps the national inventory of bridges on the Strategic Road Network (SRN). A 2025 peer-reviewed review of DoR data counted about 1,656 bridges on Nepal's national highways, of which roughly 85 percent are concrete structures; reinforced cement concrete (RCC) T-beam bridges are the single most common type, with 835 such bridges accounting for around 62 percent of total bridge length. Beyond the national highways, provincial governments built 435 motorable bridges between fiscal years 2075/76 and 2079/80 BS (2018/19-2022/23 AD), and hundreds more serve local roads.

Since 28 February 2013 (2069 BS), the Government of Nepal has used the computerised Bridge Management System (BMS) as the official tool for bridge inventory, inspection and maintenance planning, and the DoR's annual Statistics of Strategic Road Network (SSRN) publications include a list of the main bridges of the SRN. These official datasets are the authoritative reference for bridge names, lengths, spans and construction years cited on this page.

The backbone that these bridges serve is the roughly 1,030-kilometre East-West Highway, officially the Mahendra Highway (NH01), which runs across the Tarai from Kakarbhitta on the Mechi River in the east to Gaddachauki on the Mahakali border in the far west. Because every major river of Nepal - the Koshi, Narayani (Gandaki), Karnali and Mahakali systems - must be crossed by this single national artery, the highway's big river bridges are among the most strategically important structures in the country.

The answer to "longest bridge in Nepal" depends on what is being measured, and different structures hold different records. For conventional motorable road bridges, the record holder is the 1,015-metre Karnali (Geruwa) Bridge at Kothiyaghat in Bardiya district, opened in 2014 (2071 BS). The 1,150-metre Koshi Barrage road crossing is physically longer, but it is a barrage carrying a roadway rather than a conventional bridge. For a single uninterrupted span, nothing in Nepal matches the 325-metre main span of the cable-stayed Karnali Bridge at Chisapani.

Pedestrian structures hold their own records: the Dodhara Chandani suspension bridge over the Mahakali River in Kanchanpur, completed in 2005, stretches about 1,452.96 metres, making it Nepal's longest suspension bridge - but it is only 1.6 metres wide and carries foot traffic and two-wheelers, not cars or trucks. Understanding these distinctions explains why different sources give different answers to the same question.

The Karnali Bridge at Chisapani, often searched as "Karnali bridge Chisapani," is Nepal's most celebrated piece of bridge engineering. It is an asymmetric, single-tower, cable-stayed bridge - the first and, to date, only cable-stayed road bridge in the country - with a total length of 500 metres, a main span of 325 metres and a deck width of about 11.3 metres. The bridge carries the Mahendra Highway across the Karnali River, connecting Kailali district on the west bank with Bardiya district on the east, and serves as the gateway between Nepal's far-western plains and the rest of the country.

The bridge was designed by the American engineering firm Steinman, Boynton, Gronquist & Birdsall and constructed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan, with funding from the World Bank's International Development Association. Construction was completed in 1993 (2050 BS) and the bridge was formally inaugurated in 1994. At the time of its completion, its single-tower asymmetric design and 325-metre span placed it among the notable cable-stayed bridges of the world, and it remains the longest bridge span in Nepal.

Because it is the only high-capacity crossing of the Karnali on the East-West Highway, the bridge carries virtually all road traffic between Sudurpaschim Province and central Nepal, and any closure - for maintenance or after incidents - forces long diversions. The bridge's strategic load has prompted plans for additional Karnali crossings and rehabilitation under DoR bridge programmes.

The Koshi Barrage (Koshi barrage bridge in common searches) is the structure most Nepalis actually drive across when they cross the country's largest river, the Saptakoshi. Built between 1958 and 1962 (2015-2019 BS) under the Koshi Agreement signed between Nepal and India on 25 April 1954, the barrage is about 1,150 metres long with 56 gates and a roadway roughly 10 metres wide. It links Sunsari district (Koshi Province) on the east bank with Saptari district (Madhesh Province) on the west, and the Mahendra Highway runs directly over it.

The barrage was designed primarily for flood control and irrigation under the bilateral Koshi project, with the road deck as an integral crossing. More than six decades after completion, it remains the only motorable crossing of the Saptakoshi in the Tarai, which makes it both indispensable and a recognised bottleneck: the structure is ageing, carries far more traffic than its designers anticipated, and sits in a river famous for shifting course and catastrophic floods. Proposals for an alternative high-capacity bridge over the Koshi have featured in successive government plans.

For travellers, the barrage area adjoins the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, and the crossing is a well-known vantage point for the river's vast monsoon flows - a reminder that Nepal's biggest bridges exist precisely where its rivers are most powerful.

The Narayani Bridge at Narayangadh connects Bharatpur in Chitwan district with Gaindakot in Nawalpur across the Narayani (Gandaki) River, one of Nepal's three great river systems. The bridge is roughly 420 metres long and rests on large circular piers; its foundation was laid in 1981 (2038 BS) and construction took nearly four years, putting it in service from the mid-1980s. Standing at the junction where the Mahendra Highway meets the traffic funnel from Kathmandu and Pokhara via Mugling, it is one of the busiest bridges in Nepal. A second, cable-stayed "iconic" Narayani bridge has been under way beside it - construction finally began in late 2025 (2082 BS) after about 18 months of delay following the foundation-laying - to relieve the ageing original.

In the western Tarai, the Rapti Bridge in Dang district is Nepal's second-longest motorable bridge at 865 metres, with a 10.5-metre-wide deck. Completed in 2019 (2076 BS) at a cost of about Rs 1 billion, it connects Sisahaniya of Rapti Rural Municipality with Mahadeva of Gadhawa Rural Municipality across the West Rapti River, giving year-round access to communities that were previously cut off every monsoon. It was formally inaugurated by the prime minister in January 2021.

The current national record holder, the 1,015-metre Karnali (Geruwa) Bridge at Kothiyaghat in Bardiya, belongs to the same generation of long Tarai bridges. Opened in 2014 (2071 BS) at a cost of around Rs 1 billion, this multi-span bridge crosses the Geruwa channel of the Karnali River and connects the Rajapur area - an island-like tract encircled by Karnali branches - to the national road network on the Postal (Hulaki) Highway corridor. Despite holding the "longest bridge in Nepal" title, it remains far less famous than the cable-stayed Chisapani bridge upstream.

At the eastern end of the Mahendra Highway, the Mechi Bridge joins Kakarbhitta in Jhapa district with Panitanki in India's Darjeeling district across the Mechi River. The modern bridge, about 583 metres long, was built by India's National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) and inaugurated in January 2019 (Magh 2075 BS). It links the Mahendra Highway with India's National Highway 327B, and both roads form part of Asian Highway route AH2, making the bridge Nepal's principal eastern trade gateway.

At the opposite end of the country, the Mahakali River defines the far-western border. The famous Dodhara Chandani suspension bridge - about 1,452.96 metres long with a 225.4-metre main span - has connected the Dodhara-Chandani enclave with Bhimdatta (Mahendranagar) since 2005, but only for pedestrians and two-wheelers. To give the area a proper road link, the government began building a four-lane, 800-metre motorable Mahakali bridge in 2017 (2074 BS) at an estimated cost of Rs 3.66 billion, connecting Dodhara Chandani Municipality with Bhimdatta Municipality. The project reached about 99 percent completion but has repeatedly stalled over budget disbursements, with work resuming in 2024 to finish the remaining deck and blacktopping.

Once fully open, the four-lane Mahakali bridge will be among the widest bridges in Nepal at roughly 23.9 metres, and it is expected to anchor trade infrastructure - including a proposed dry port - in the far-western corner where Nepal, and India's Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh states, meet.

The list below summarises Nepal's most significant road bridges - the record holders and the strategic river crossings of the East-West Highway - with river, corridor, length, opening year and structural type. Lengths and dates follow the Department of Roads inventory and reporting by major Nepali media; minor variations of a few metres appear between sources for some structures.

The DoR Bridge Branch is responsible for bridge standards, design review, construction supervision and maintenance across the Strategic Road Network. Its Bridge Management System records each structure's location, river, length, span configuration, type and condition rating, and inspection data from the BMS drives the annual maintenance and rehabilitation programme. The DoR also publishes bridge standards, inspection guidelines and the SSRN statistics that list the main bridges of the network.

Bridge building has accelerated sharply in recent decades, supported by development partners. On 28 March 2025, the World Bank approved a US$150 million financing package for Nepal's Third Bridges Improvement and Maintenance Program (BIMP-III), led by the Department of Roads, to strengthen the climate resilience of SRN bridges through improved structural designs, real-time monitoring technology and institutional capacity building. Earlier phases of the same programme financed maintenance and new construction across hundreds of bridges.

Resilience is the central challenge: Nepal's bridges must survive some of the world's most sediment-laden, flood-prone rivers as well as seismic risk. Monsoon floods regularly damage or destroy bridges, and several major crossings - the Koshi Barrage above all - are operating well beyond their originally envisaged traffic loads. New long bridges in the Tarai, second crossings at Narayangadh and on the Karnali, and the four-lane Mahakali bridge together represent the current generation of investment in keeping the national network connected.