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NEW DELHI, Oct. 3 (AFP): Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened a tunnel in the Himalayas on Saturday that will dramatically reduce the time it takes to send troops to the country’s remote Chinese border as tensions rise between Asian neighbors.
The tunnel runs through the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and is on one of the two main routes for troops heading to the border areas in Ladakh.
Twenty Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese were killed in June in a deadly clash in Ladakh, which shares a disputed boundary with China’s restless Xinjiang and Tibet regions.
Since then, the two nuclear-armed countries have rushed to send tens of thousands of troops and additional weapons to the area, and have been locked in a tense standoff for months.
The $ 400 million, nine-kilometer (six-mile) tunnel will shorten the journey by about 50 kilometers (30 miles) and four hours, allowing travelers to avoid a complicated route through a landslide-prone Himalayan pass of land.
The tunnel, at an altitude of more than 3,000 meters (10,000 feet), has been hailed as a feat of engineering.
A decade in the making, freezing temperatures and challenging terrain meant that construction work could only be carried out for about six months out of the year.
The project is part of New Delhi’s push to catch up with the development of Chinese infrastructure on the other side of the border.
In the past six years, the Modi government has accelerated several border projects including highways, bridges and high-altitude airstrips.
“We have put all our energy into developing our border infrastructure. The country has not seen roads, bridges and tunnels built on this scale,” the prime minister said after inaugurating the tunnel on Saturday.
“In addition to the premises, this (infrastructure) will also greatly benefit the men and women of our military,” Modi added.
New Delhi hopes that these projects will promote tourism and stimulate economic activity.
Sanjay Kundu, the police chief of Himachal Pradesh, which shares a long border with Tibet, recently proposed better roads and mobile connectivity, as well as even weapons training for the state’s border villages.
The Border Roads Organization of India, which implements most of these strategic projects, says it has built more in the past four years than in the previous decade.
Their boss, Lieutenant General Harpal Singh, told AFP that they were going ahead with “long-term plans based on their strategic calculations to develop these regions.” – AFP
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