The Border Roads Organisation looks after some of the very important roads in Himachal Pradesh. These are 220 km-long Manali - Serchu road, on way to Leh via Keylong, Darcha, Patsio through Lahaul valley, 165 km-long Wangtu Kuarlk portion of NH 22, Hindustan Tibet road, 110 km-long Tandi-Killar road in Lahaul valley, on way to Kistwar and Batote in Jammu and Kashmir and 80 km-Dhami-Kingal road.

The Manali-Keylong-Serchu road is the lifeline of the people of Lahaul-Spiti district. It is also an important alternate route to Kargil-Leh in Ladakh. The 13,050 feet high Rohtang Pass and the 16,047 feet high Baralacha La Pass are important bottle-necks on this route. These passes remain naturally open for traffic from July 15 to October 15 only. That open period is highly insufficient for today’s busy times, both for the Armed Forces as well as the civilians. The BRO has, therefore, got to open these passes in the beginning of May every year. This year it was thrown open to vehicular traffic in the last week of April. And towards winter, BRO generally keeps this road open at least up to November 15 or even longer depending upon how much snow falls on the concerned hill ranges.

While meeting the mediapersons during his recent visit the DGBR said that keeping in view the hard task involved in keeping Rohtang and Baralacha La passes open for sufficient number of days every time, the BRO is now exploring possibilities of building yet another alternate route to Leh-Ladakh from HP side and the open period can be elongated as far as possible. The alignment of the proposed new road will perhaps take off from the existing Hindustan Tibet road at Sumdo, pass through Kaza, Kibber, Prangla Pass etc and hit Ladakh at Tso Morari Lake in Rupsho area of Ladakh. Still another alignment under exploration can take off from Udaipur on Sansari-Killar-Thirot road and hit Ladakh region in the village Padam in Kargil sub division.

The DGBR further said that BRO is now poised for its diversification in a big way, firstly for economic uplift of the people of the tribal belts constituting the border belt of the country and, secondly, to make optimum utilisation of BRO’s resource available at any particular area/pocket of its deployment.

The DGBR also addressed a sainik sammelan at Shimla. He exhorted the BRO officers and troops to put in their very best endeavours in the performance of their day-to-day duties and execute the assigned works within commensurating cost.

The DGBR gave way prizes and awards to those found having shown exemplary performance in the recent past. He also released a new in-house Hindi magazine Deepak Jyoti recently launched by the Project mainly to motivate the troops to use Hindi in the day-to-day correspondence as well as in interpersonal communication.