INTERNSHIPS: A true value addition

Internships have been a source of consistency and motivation for me to stick to my core field, i.e., civil engineering.?Sometimes the course, subjects or even the curriculum fails to motivate. At this juncture, the internships came to the rescue. The key feature of it is the liberty it offers to commit mistakes. Mistakes pave the learning path.?Mistakes are directly proportional to the learnings, bringing agility to the table. Susceptibility towards committing mistakes provides longevity to sustain in your choice of field.?

In 2015 after completing my 5th semester of my Bachelor's, I realized that I would be getting almost 3 months of holidays. I became highly anxious because it was clear that I would be stuck for such a long break if I didn’t find some opportunity for myself. I learned about tunnel construction at Rohtang Pass in Manali through a newspaper column. It attracted my attention not only because of the construction project but also the level of adversity it comprises. I was surprised to witness 13 avalanche zones from Solang stretch to the Southern Portal of the tunnel in Dhundhi.?I started contacting various employees of the Austrian and Indian contractor companies associated with the project, and within a week after stumbling across hundreds of profile, I got that breakthrough.?

In the next 10 days, I was there at the face of the tunnel covering my face with an N95 mask. Moving for over two months to a Himalayan town was an exhilarating experience. The journey from my accommodation to the tunnel used to involve a 6 km Hitchhike in a truck, a 2 km hitchhike on a bike and a 2 kms walking trail.?

Working inside the tunnel at such an altitude is not for the faint-hearted. There used to be a good amount of 5-8 degrees Celcius temperature difference inside and outside the tunnel. I could only stay at the face of the tunnel for max. 20 -30 minutes due to the heavy ingress of pollutants / smoke generated due to the excavation of the rock by the triple-arm boomers (excavator machines). The colour of my spit used to turn to completely black. Amid all of this, there’s always used to be the water dripping from the tunnel ceiling. This inconvenience gets completely averted using Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), which automates almost every operation to be carried out at the tunnel face.?However, this site was not a conventional one; it was a part of the Young Fold Himalayan Range which comprised different categories of the rock class. TBM is generally used in the hard rock category zones, wherein here the rock was utterly unpredictable. In order to avoid any severe inconvenience in the future, a sequential process of excavation was decided, forming a part of the methodology named the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM).?

This tunnel became the World's Longest Road Tunnel above 10,000 feets of altitude above sea level. The crucial thing to be noticed here is the reduction of 45 kms of distance to just 8.84 Kms. Not to mention the most dangerous 14 hairpin bends on the route of Rohtang and the famous traffic jam of tourist vehicles.?

I learnt the value of collaboration from the Consortium of the contractors formed by the Austrian group named STRABAG and the well-known Indian infrastructure group named AFCONS. They made the dream seen by generations of the villagers of Lahaul back in 1984, a reality in 2020.?

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