This is really a great news and an achievement by BRO -Border Road Organisation and of course Indian Govt!

This is a 8.8 km long tunnel connecting Manali with Leh built at a cost of ₹ 3200 Cr. This Rohtang tunnel called “Atal tunnel” will be inaugurated by end of Sept 2020.

Now the original length of 474 km will come down to only 46 km ….saving huge quantities of fuel and cutting long and tedious journey by about 7 hours.
The tunnel is 10.5 metres wide and has a height of 5.52 metres and a car can zip through at 80 kmph. The horseshoe shaped single-tube, double-lane tunnel has many firsts.
With a length of 9.02 km, it is the longest in the world at an altitude of over 3,000 metres or 10,000 feet mean sea level.
Further, it is also the country’s first tunnel to have an escape tunnel within the main tunnel because of the topography.Globally, escape tunnels are built separately along the main tunnel.

This is also the first tunnel to deploy the Rowa flyer technology, which allows engineers to work at inverted levels.
The tunnel has consumed 14,508 metric tonnes of steel and 2,37,596 metric tonnes of cement, and excavated out 14 lakh cubic metres soil and rocks, using the drill and blast technique for excavation.
At the peak, the tunnel is 2.5 km deep in under mountain belly at the South Portal side and the lowest overburden is 1.5 km yet.
There was not a single fatal accident in all these 10 years of the project life.