A tunnel nearing completion in the Indian Himalayas will slash by hours thetime it takes troops to reach the Chinese border, part of an infrastructureblitz by New Delhi that is gathering pace since a bloody border clash.
The nuclear-armed Asian giants blame each other for a brutal high-altitudebattle in June that left 20 Indian soldiers dead and an unspecified numberof Chinese casualties.
Both have sent massive troop reinforcements, but India has also stepped upits activities behind the frontlines — belatedly so, analysts say.
Its stepped-up infrastructure programme includes roads and bridges as wellas high-altitude helipads and airstrips for civilian and military aircraft.
The showpiece is a $400-million tunnel in Himachal Pradesh state, providingan all-weather route for military convoys to avoid a 50-kilometre trudgethrough mountain passes that are snow-bound in winter and subject tofrequent landslides.
From late this month, what used to be a four-hour, winding, high-altitudecrossing will be cut to a 10-minute dash through the mountains in thestate-of-the-art tunnel.
“There have been times on the pass route when vehicles have broken down,causing traffic jams of even six to eight hour,” said Lieutenant-GeneralHarpal Singh, head of India’s Border Roads Organisation (BRO).
“This tunnel and the other infrastructure plans change a lot for thetroops,” he told *AFP*.Engineering feat
Labourers are working overtime to get the tunnel ready before PrimeMinister Narendra Modi is due to open it later this month.
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Currently, essential items such as arms, ammunition and food have to betransported up in bulk before winter starts in an area where temperaturescan plunge to minus 40 Celsius.
Constructed at an altitude of more than 3,000 metres and stretching ninekilometres, the Atal Rohtang tunnel is also a feat of engineering.
A decade in the making, freezing winter temperatures meant work could onlytake place from April to September. Workers wore special microchips to helplocate them if they got trapped in an avalanche.
Still, India’s efforts only belatedly mirror those of China, experts say.
“Earlier administrations wasted two decades,” said Harsh Pant, from theObserver Research Foundation think-tank in New Delhi.
“China, and its infrastructure, is much stronger today.”
