The construction site near the village of Chilling in the Ladakh region is about 250 km (150 miles) west of the area where Indian and Chinese troops are locked in the most serious confrontation in decades.
But when ready, the highway will provide the only year-round access to large parts of Ladakh, including the border area. That will go some way to putting India on a par with China, which has a network of roads and helipads on its side of the border.
“It will be much easier for the army after this path is finished,” Eliyas said, parts of his face and khaki uniform covered in fine stone dust.
The protracted fighting in the remote western Himalayan region erupted into a bloody hand-to-hand clash in June in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed and China suffered an unknown number of casualties. The Asian giants fought a short but bloody border war in 1962.
The 175-mile (283 km) long Nimmu-Padam-Darcha (NPD) highway, where Eliyas is working, is expected to be completed in three years, authorities said. It highlights India’s efforts, which have redoubled after the latest tensions, to develop key infrastructure – roads, tunnels, bridges and airfields – along the unstable 3,500 km (2,170 mile) border with China.
The highway will connect with an 8.8 km (5.5 mile) tunnel that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate in the coming weeks, opening up the snowy deserts of Ladakh to the rest of the country throughout the year.
There are two main roads that connect Ladakh to the rest of India, but they are closed for at least four months every winter. The only way urgent supplies are sent to Ladakh during these months is by air.
With thousands of its troops amassed on the border and no sign of downsizing, India is now pushing harder to make its way through the Himalayas.
“We will not back down from taking a big, hard step in the interest of our country,” Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament this month, adding that the government had doubled the budget for infrastructure works on the border with China.
The frantic construction itself has become a thorny issue this summer with the Chinese complaining that Indian activity in the mountains is destabilizing, Indian officials said. But China built its infrastructure in the area years ago, and it must be combined, they said.
“China does not recognize the so-called ‘Ladakh Union Territory’ illegally established by India and opposes the construction of infrastructure in the border area for the purpose of military control,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman office said. He added that according to a recent consensus of both parties, neither party should take any action that complicates the situation in the border area.
China’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
QUESTION OF HOURS
China’s network of roads and railways, logistics warehouses and helipads means it can move troops to advanced areas in a matter of hours, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, a distinguished fellow at the New Delhi think tank Observer Research Foundation.
For India, it would take days to match those deployments, he said.
“The construction of infrastructure by the Chinese is not only aimed at the rapid deployment of forces, but also at maintaining them for a relatively longer period of time,” Rajagopalan said.
Conceived in 1999, India’s NPD project progressed at a glacial pace until work began just a couple of years ago, said NK Jain, a commander of the state Border Roads Organization (BRO).
Since then, the BRO has built about 100 km of the NPD project and built 11 of the 15 major bridges on the route. “Our work is happening at twice the speed in the last two years,” Jain said.
New drills that push sticks of dynamite deeper and faster into hard rock to blow them up have improved construction speed, said B. Kishen, a BRO executive engineer overseeing the project near Chilling.
On a recent afternoon, dozens of workers removed debris from a recently destroyed section of the road. A few kilometers away, another group ducked under a bulldozer as explosives exploded to clear ground for another section of the road.
Work will continue through the harsh winter, when temperatures drop below minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit) and strong winds at altitudes above 11,000 feet (3,300 m) make road construction even more challenging, he said. Kishen.
The government has identified 73 strategically important highways along the border with China, of which 61 are with the BRO, covering more than 3,300 km (2,000 miles). A report from the parliamentary commission in March noted that 75% of the work under the BRO had been completed.
The complete road network will reduce travel time between key Indian military bases, allowing for faster mobilization of troops and facilitating patrolling in some advanced areas, an Indian official said.
“It will also lead to less spending on forces,” the official said, and the all-weather roads will replace the need for expensive airlift operations during the winter months.
“We will have a better chance of reaching the Chinese.”
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