How Arunachal is front & centre in Modi govt’s massive border infra push to counter China

Of total highway projects worth Rs 1.6 lakh cr announced for Northeast last month, Arunachal got the lion’s share. Meanwhile, BRO’s outlay also saw a significant jump this year.

New Delhi December 6 dmanewsdesk: As work begins on the ambitious Arunachal Frontier Highway, some of India’s other key projects in the Northeast — especially Arunachal Pradesh — are nearing completion while some others, such as a proposed tunnel under the Brahmaputra river, are in the final stages of completion.

In a turnaround from its decades-old policy of being wary of strengthening road connectivity along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for fear of Chinese aggression, India is now in the middle of a massive border infrastructure push.

Given the ongoing standoff with China in eastern Ladakh, the government has ramped up the speed at which border infrastructure is being created.

“There has been a lot of push on the infrastructure development along the LAC, especially in the Northeast. The idea is to fast-track the ongoing projects and initiate new ones. Such has been the focus that the budget for Border Roads Organisation (BRO) has seen a significant jump,” an official source told ThePrint. 

Incidentally, of the total number of highway projects worth Rs 1.6 lakh crore announced by the central government for the Northeast earlier this month, Arunachal Pradesh got the lion’s share of the works, amounting to Rs 44,000 crore.

The push to develop border infrastructure began under the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government but it was under the Modi government that the work picked up.

According to data from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, from a mere 0.6 km of national highways built a day during the UPA era (2009-14), road construction more than doubled during the NDA regime, touching an all-time high of 1.5 km a day between 2014 and March 2019.

Together, different central government agencies, including the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the BRO, have built 2,731 km of national highways across the eight Northeastern states between 2014 and 2019.

In the Union Budget 2022-23, BRO’s capital outlay rose by a record 40 per cent to Rs 3,500 crore compared to Rs 2,500 crore in FY 2021-22. 

In 2021, BRO completed 102 roads and bridges at various places in the north-western and eastern states — including the world’s highest motorable road at Umling La at 19,024 feet.

The BRO has inducted heavy excavators, spider excavators, and lightweight crawler rock drills, besides other equipment, to fast-track the projects, officials said.

According to the government, the BRO has built 2,089 km of roads along the LAC in the past five years. 

Sources said that the emphasis of the Modi government on border infrastructure is visible from the fact that one of the first things it did after coming to power in 2014 was to set up the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL).

This new organisation was given the mandate to construct highways in the Northeast and hilly areas of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, which was previously mainly done by the NHAI and BRO directly.

NHIDCL, being a separate wing of the road ministry to focus on the Northeast, has helped expedite project completion, sources had told ThePrint earlier.

Source: The Print