The Howrah Bridge is a balanced steel bridge over the Hooghly River in West Bengal, India. Commissioned in 1943, the bridge was originally named the New Howrah Bridge, because it replaced a pontoon bridge at the same location linking the twin cities of Howrah and Kolkata, which are located at the opposite banks of each other. On 14 June 1965, it was renamed Rabindra Setu after the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Indian and Asian Nobel laureate. It is still popularly known as the Howrah Bridge.

The Hooghly River or popularly called Ganga or Kati-Ganga in the Puranas, is a river that rises close to Giria, which lies north of Baharampur and Palashi in Murshidabad. It is the western distributary of the Ganges. The main course of the Ganges then flows into Bangladesh as the Padma. A man-made canal, built in the 1960s and early-1970s at Farakka, connects the Ganges, flowing through Malda, to the Hooghly to bring the abundant waters of the Himalayan river to the comparatively narrow river that rises in eastern West Bengal.