New Delhi: Not the ‘Three Gorges Dam’ or the asinine plan to tunnel the ferocious Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra river near the Great Bend or the grand adventures in space or in the deepest of seas, China’s biggest technological challenge till date is in completing the rail network that connects Chengdu with Lhasa, a project that is feared to fail in meeting the 2024 deadline.
Chengdu, a military and a commercial hub, is the provincial capital of the bustling Sichuan province while Lhasa is the main seat of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), located in the vast and desolate expanse of a 4,000-metre-high plateau.
The centre-piece of China’s 13th five-year plan, the Sichuan-Tibet rail network is central to China’s plan to usher socio-economic development of south-western China including the TAR and Xinjiang and also to further strategic aims in Nepal.
Once complete, the Chengdu-Lhasa journey will be shortened to about 12 hours from about 50 hours now and a year-long journey on horseback a hundred years back.
But the railway network is planned to snake along stretches very close to the Indian border including making Nyingchi, just across the Arunachal Pradesh border, one of the main rail hubs.
This has enormous military significance for the swift transport of troops and war equipment to the border with India at very short notice. The implications are huge in the backdrop of searing tension between the two Asian giants even as more than a lakh troops stay deployed in close proximity across the border.
But then Mother Nature has put a huge challenge that will test China’s technological prowess to the fullest.
The 1,567 km long rail stretch originates at Sichuan’s Chengdu city and moves west through Ya’an City, Kangding County, Qamdo, Nyingchi, and Shannan before reaching Lhasa.
The railway line passes through areas of extreme geological instability and topography with complex water distribution systems and very delicate ecology. With high-altitude making work efficiency decline, the other big challenge is the extremely difficult and complex engineering because of the bridges over gigantic chasms across mountains or the tunneling work involved deep under the surface.
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Just to give an idea of the engineering complexity involved, the Nyingchi-Lhasa stretch comprises about 120 bridges and about 70 tunnels—of which the longest one is 40 km long while the deepest one is 2,100 metres below the surface.
Chinese media reports have quoted a recently published paper in the peer-reviewed publication ‘Journal of Engineering Geology’ where a top scientist is quoted as saying that the searing underground geothermal heat is posing an insurmountable challenge to the deep tunneling work.
According to the report, ground temperatures touch up to 89 degrees Celsius (192 degrees Fahrenheit) as tremendous heat emanates from at random spots from the numerous faults.
Scientists believe an enormous amount of heat was trapped inside the elevation that became the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau that was created after the Tibetan plateau collided with the Eurasian plate and the Indian subcontinent.
A recent paper ‘Risk Analysis Of Major Engineering Geological Hazards For Sichuan-Tibet Railway In The Phase Of Feasibility Study’ published in the ‘Journal of Engineering Geology’ says: “The Sichuan-Tibet Railway is the most challenging railway project ever in the world. The project region is characterized by various adverse geological conditions including active tectonic movement, intensive mega faults, abrupt topographic relief and frequent geological disasters.”
The paper concludes: “The results show that both surface and subsurface engineering risks are significant and can threaten the safety of the project.”
