The Road to Bhutan

By Anubhuti Vishnoi

The 38-km-long, two-lane highway will link Pathshala in Assam to Nganglam in Bhutan, providing access to Bhutan’s biggest cement plant, the Nu 5,170-million Dungsam cement plant that is being constructed as part of the Indo-Bhutan Friendship Project.

While the ministry had already readied a 29-km-long NH-standard road from Pathshala towards Nganglam in 2008, it has only now finally completed work on a greenfield 9-km road leading right up to the Indo-Bhutan border.

The road will have the unique distinction of becoming the first National Highway with two special ‘elephants only’ underpasses to allow traffic-free movement for the big mammal. Parts of the highway will touch the Mahananda wild life sanctuary that boasts of a significant elephant population.

Work on the Dungsam cement plant, which was conceived in the 1980s, came to a standstill in January 2001 when terrorists targeted Bhutanese vehicles and the road to the project site—from Pathshala to Nganglam—was officially sealed. The United Liberation Front of Asom, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland and the Bodo Liberation Tigers Force (BLTF) had bases in Bhutan then. In March this year, the route will be unsealed.

“The highway from Pathshala off NH 31 in Assam to Nganglam on the Bhutan border is part of the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for the Northeast (SARDP-NE). There was no road at all for the last 9 km towards Bhutan and insurgency in this area had made it very difficult to carry out construction work earlier,” says a senior official.

“The new highway, known as NH 152, will provide connectivity to the cement plant on the Bhutan border and will help export cement to the Northeast in a big way. That is why, instead of a lower category road, we have constructed a NH-like road with paved shoulders,” says the official.

MEA is also funding the construction of another 25-km road from Nganglam to Gyelposhing on Bhutan’s side to improve access to the cement plant. After the plant is commissioned, about 700 trucks will ply along the Nganglam highway, pushing up the economy of south-east Bhutan, besides creating a major export corridor into north-eastern India.

The project, whose production capacity is estimated at one million tonne a year, was conceived in the 1980s after the Geological Survey of India found vast limestone deposits at the confluence of the Kuring and Marung rivers in the Nganglam region in 1964.