Brigadier from Karnataka is behind Shyok River bridge
BENGALURU: The India-China tension near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Eastern Ladakh has again highlighted the importance of border infrastructure development for India in the Ladakh sector. “There has been a gradual shift in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) training activities and building up a cluster of military infrastructure under their Western Theatre Command. Their major concern is centred around protecting Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), especially the area of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). This is where China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) enters Pakistan,” said Brigadier DM Purvimath, VSM and Bar (Retd).
He is the officer under whose leadership as the then chief engineer, the Border Road Organisation (BRO) had built the all-weather, 70-tonne bridge over the river Shyok and the 255-km-long Darbuk Shyok Daulat Beg Oldi (DSDBO) road under ‘Project Himank’, known as Mountain Tamers. Earlier, the journey from Leh to Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) would take two days.
After the construction of the bridge at Shyok, the road up to DBO and replacing temporary bridges with permanent ones, the journey time was reduced to seven hours. Brigadier Purvimath belongs to Karnataka. He recently superannuated as deputy director general, NCC (Karnataka & Goa). He lives in Bengaluru.
The officer said that “a lot of work has been done on development of roads in Ladakh region since 2014. The formation and troops across the Shyok used to remain cut off from the rest of India for nearly six months because of lack of adequate infrastructure,” he said.
“I was posted at Leh as Chief Engineer, ‘Himank’, between 2015 and 2018. We constructed the bridge across River Shyok and commissioned it in 2016. This facilitated the movement of troops and vehicles across the river throughout the year. The BRO had devised new technology using local materials and geocrete to construct a cementitious-base road, which could withstand recurring snowfall and cold climate,” he said. Given the climate in the region, the BRO gets not more than four months as clear working days. For the bridge construction, the BRO had used micro piling technology.
“Lot of heavy construction equipment was airlifted and thousands of labourers were mobilised and acclimatized before the working season. In summer, the temperature hovers around 10 to 20 degrees Celsius, and in winter, it dips to -40 degrees Celsius. Oxygen levels are 50 per cent less at that altitude,” said the officer.