Strategic Third Axis To Leh: NPD Road’s Criticality For China, Pakistan Fronts In Ladakh-Teaser 4

Don’t Miss part IV of our series ‘The Himalayan Frontier’, Strategic Third Axis To Leh, premiering on January 26, 2024. We document India’s infrastructural development in Eastern Ladakh to deal with Beijing’s aggression in the border dispute along the China-occupied Tibet border or the Line of Actual Control. Alternate axes are significant in also dealing with the Pakistani second front in Siachen and from POJK. This is the fourth winter that India has had an advanced frontier posture following Xi Jinping’s belligerence that caused the Galwan clashes in 2020 at the India-China border. In this episode, we travel on the strategic third axis To Leh from Padam along the Darcha-Padam-Nimmu (NPD) road to Leh. This is a crucial third road to Leh that will ensure all-weather connectivity for India’s military and civilians, even when up to fifteen-foot high snow walls usually close passes as high as 17,000+ feet for months in the winter. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) is the nodal agency for this infrastructural push and we travel with their personnel to understand their engineering achievements through testing alpine altitudes, and how they drill through mountain ranges and lay bridges at these heights, temperatures, and topographies.

StratNews Global’s team of Amitabh P. Revi, Rohit Pandita, and Karan Marwaha travels along alpine altitudes through the frozen desert landscape in eastern Ladakh and Siachen to bring you this series: The Himalayan Frontier. These ground reports document the sustained infrastructure push in road connectivity and air bridges, record substantial progress in alternate axes that are in play and are being planned, and capture on camera how the Indian Army, the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), and the Indian Air Force’s women, men and machines are honing their all-weather readiness during another winter, against the two-front threat from China and Pakistan.

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