BUILD-UP ON THE BORDER
A BURST OF ROAD AND BRIDGE-BUILDING SEES INDIA PLAY CATCH-UP WITH CHINA’S BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE. DE-ESCALATION WILL NOT MEAN A REDUCTION IN THE ROADWORKS
A burst of road and bridge-building sees India play catch-up with China’s border infrastructure. De-escalation won’t mean a reduction in the roadworks
Sometime in late April, two Chinese motorised divisions— over 20,000 soldiers in trucks, equipped with light tanks and self-propelled howitzers—left their exercise area at the edge of the Gobi desert in Hotan, Xinjiang, and hit the ‘Sky Road’. The Xinjiang-Tibet highway is thus called because it is one of the world’s highest motorable roads, with an average altitude of 4,500 metres. From here, these divisions branched off towards a series of feeder roads that took them right up to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India. Once these formations were in position along the 480-km stretch in eastern Ladakh, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China began Phase 2 of their military plan—triggering incursions across the LAC in four locations using small batches of troops.
The PLA force was insufficient for a full-fledged invasion (for which they would need between four and six divisions) of Ladakh but just enough to block any attempt at militarily evicting them. The Indian Army rushed two infantry divisions to beef up the Leh-based 3 Division even as the IAF flew in fighter jets and helicopter gunships as deterrents. The counter deployment rode on freshly topped strategic roads and bridges built in the biggest post-Independence burst of infrastructure-building—over 4,700 kilometres—along the disputed frontier.
The largest military standoff between the Asian giants since the 1962 war culminated in a violent clash on June 15 which claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of their PLA counterparts. A two-hour phone call between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on July 5 saw both armies begin the process of stepping back or ‘de-escalating’.
On July 7, just hours after the deescalation began, defence minister
Rajnath Singh asked Lt General
Harpal Singh, director-general,
Border Roads Organisation (BRO), to expedite the existing projects along the LAC—road infrastructure,
30 permanent bridges and tunnels worth Rs 20,000 crore. The directives to the MoD’s road construction agency was a clear signal from the government—de-escalation did not mean the foot was being taken off the infrastructure pedal. “Our work did not stop through the standoff, we’ve in fact accelerated construction,” says a senior government official. The BRO is also flying in road construction workers from states like Jharkhand to achieve their expedited targets this year. Intense construction over the past decade has brought Indian trucks, battle tanks, infantry combat vehicles, artillery, Brahmos missile trucks and road-mobile Agni ICBM launchers close to the border.
“India’s armed forces have the capability to move into multiple sectors at one go,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his June 19 address at an all-party meeting. India’s infrastructure push, well within its side of the LAC, is a frantic and belated attempt to match the Chinese construction on the plateau. The BRO’s budget was more than doubled— from Rs 5,500 crore in 2017-18 to Rs 11,300 crore in 2020-21.
One of the many reasons analysts have attributed to the PLA’s move is a message to halt the Indian buildup. The most crucial project to have been completed so far, the 260-km Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldie (DSDBO) road is, as an MoD briefing note calls it, ‘highly sensitive and critical for army formations in the area’. The all-weather road with multiple bridges cuts journey time between Leh and Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO), the northernmost outpost, from a week to three days.
In a June 19 article on news portal warontherocks.com which was widely read by India’s security establishment, Yun Sun, senior fellow and co-director of the East Asia Program at the Stimson