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India is 140 meters away from completing the Zojila, Asia’s longest bi-directional road tunnel, in a project that has been progressing for almost six years under the eponymous pass in Kashmir, at an altitude of 3,000 meters, with excavation breakthrough confirmed for the first week of June and a final cost close to R$ 4 billion.
There are 14.15 kilometers of the main tunnel excavated in a massif where the external temperature drops to 40 degrees below zero in winter.
The work progresses simultaneously from the eastern portals, in Minamarg-Drass on the Ladakh side, and west, in Sonamarg, in the Kashmir Valley, using the modern Austrian tunneling method.
MEIL, Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited, has been handling the project since October 15, 2020, for the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited, NHIDCL.
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The total budget was revised to something close to R$ 4 billion with inflation and maintenance included, a value above what was approved in the original contract.
Six years digging rock at 12,000 feet
The Zoji La is a mountain pass at 3,528 meters that connects the Kashmir Valley to the Buddhist region of Ladakh.
For six months each year, the pass is closed by snow, isolating the entire territory from the rest of India by land.
The main gallery has a U-shape and a two-lane bidirectional track about nine meters wide.
Parallel runs an evacuation gallery of the same length, designed for evacuation in case of an accident or fire inside the main tunnel.
The work does not stop even when the mercury column hits forty degrees below zero, a usual condition in Kashmir’s winter at 3,000 meters.
Seeing a number like forty degrees below zero on a spreadsheet seems abstract. For those operating excavators there, it’s five hours of daily shifts with the risk of hypothermia even inside the machine.
MEIL went from five kilometers excavated in 2022 to more than ten at the beginning of this year. Today, one hundred and forty meters separate the team from the meeting between the two portals.
What changes in Ladakh when the Zoji La closes for snow
Ladakh has about 274,000 inhabitants spread over a plateau larger than Santa Catarina.
For six months every year, the only option to get there is by plane to Leh or a detour of almost five hundred kilometers via Manali, in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh, with about nine additional hours of travel.
When the tunnel is ready, the crossing between Sonamarg and Drass drops from three and a half hours to fifteen minutes, according to NHIDCL.
And the gain is not just logistical. Ladakh directly borders Aksai Chin, a territory controlled by China since the 1962 war, and is a few hours from Pakistan on the Kashmir side.
All military movement to the Line of Actual Control and the Line of Control, the two hot borders, passes through this road.
Today, in the middle of winter, supplies for the Indian Army travel by helicopter or are stored in depots on the Ladakh side. The Zojila unlocks this corridor throughout the year.
Apart from military use, tourism is expected to account for the most visible change: Ladakh receives about half a million visitors a year, a number that practically collapses in winter precisely because of the pass closure.
What can Brazil learn by looking at Kashmir?
While Brazil has been debating the Rio-São Paulo bullet train for three decades without reaching a definitive auction, India has been working on a 14-kilometer tunnel at 3,000 meters altitude in just under six years.
It’s not an isolated case. Japanese engineers are digging 32 kilometers under the mountains of Hokkaido to extend the Shinkansen to Sapporo, and NEOM, in Saudi Arabia, has contracted the excavation of two parallel tunnels of 28 kilometers each in the megacity The Line.
These are projects with a scale and timeline similar to Zojila, carried out in parallel.
I confess that I look at Zojila and wonder what Brazil would do under similar conditions. We design tunnels in São Paulo and Rio with little snow and zero risk of military border, yet we drag the schedule for a whole decade.
Zojila is expected to be fully operational by February 2028, after the paving, ventilation system, traffic control, and monitoring center stages.
Before that, the breakthrough of the main gallery between Sonamarg and Drass is expected to occur in early June. It is the moment when the teams working in opposite directions meet in the middle of the rock.
For me, this moment of meeting in the middle of the mountain has always had a symbolic weight that goes beyond the schedule. It’s the part of the project that says: it worked. And you, share in the comments if you really believe that any Brazilian project of the same scale will come off the paper at this pace.
Does any Brazilian infrastructure project of this scale have a real chance of coming off the paper before 2028?
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