Engineers from the Mumbai-based Konkan Railway Corporation Limited (KRCL) have confirmed the feasibility of a project to build a nine-km-long tunnel along the strategic Manali-Leh highway which connects Himachal Pradesh with Jammu and Kashmir. When completed in around seven years, the tunnel will make the 360-km-long road into an all-weather highway and provide a crucial second corridor into northern Kashmir.

A team from the KRC visited the site late last month and submitted their feasibility report to the Defence Ministry's Border Roads Organisation (BRO) last week.

One of the primary objectives of the Pakistani forces that intruded into Kargil early this year was to interdict the sole Srinagar-Leh highway and choke all supplies tonorthern Kashmir and Siachen. Though the project to build this tunnel was first proposed by the BRO in 1997, the events in Kargil seem to have lent an urgency to the project. ``Being only the second access into Leh, this highway is strategically very important and has to be kept operational throughout the year,'' said D G Diwate, KRCL's chief project manager who led the team to the site. At present the highway is open for only five months a year. Severe snowfall in winter, piling up to over 15 feet high, render this road inoperable for seven to eight months a year.

Even bridges along this highway are dismantled and stored away in winter as they could be destroyed by the sheer weight of accumulated snow.

``But this tunnel will ensure that the road is operable all through the year irrespective of the snowfall,'' said Diwate. The KRCL team worked amidst the rumble of trucks ferrying military supplies to the battlefront in Kargil, exploring sites for the tunnel before approving this as the shortest alignmentavailable. The proposed tunnel costing around Rs 500 crore will go right beneath some of the most inhospitable terrain, over 4,000 metres above sea level, in Jammu and Kashmir. ``The tunnel will also save 60 km of road journey, besides wear and tear of vehicles,'' Diwate said.

He said KRCL first studied the 25-km-long Aurland-Laerdal tunnel between Oslo and Bergen in Norway, before okaying designs for the tunnel on Kulu-Leh highway. Over 16 km of this tunnel, the longest in the world, have already been completed. This tunnel in Himachal Pradesh will take a total of seven years to complete, including two years to mobilise men and machinery and five years for the actual project work.

The BRO will shortly float tenders for the project once it is cleared by the defence ministry. The 750-km-long engineering marvel, Konkan Railway, built in seven years has 92 tunnels, including the longest in India, the 6.5 km-long Karbude tunnel built in less than four years. During construction, KRCL hired an army of experts,over 4,000 engineers and hi-tech tunnelling machinery and soon became the largest repository of tunnel drilling know-how in India.