The Atal Tunnel Is 9.02 Kilometres Long, Sits at 10,000 Feet, Cost More Than Three Times Its 2005 Estimate and Ended Lahaul's Six-Month Winter Cut-Off

The Atal Tunnel runs 9.02 km under the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh, from a south portal 25 km from Manali to a north portal near Sissu in the Lahaul valley. Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened it on 3 October 2020, the Ministry of Defence says, the valley was cut off for about six months of every year by snow.

The Border Roads Organisation (BRO), the defence ministry’s road-building arm, built it. The ministry’s 2022 factsheet credits it with cutting the Manali to Leh road by 46 km and the travel time by four to five hours.

What the defence ministry’s factsheet says it is

The tunnel sits in the Pir Panjal range at about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet). The south portal, the mouth where traffic enters from the Manali side, is at 3,060 m. The north portal is at 3,071 m.

It is a single horseshoe-shaped tube carrying two lanes, with an 8 m roadway inside a bore 10.5 m wide and 5.525 m of clearance overhead. The design traffic is 3,000 cars and 1,500 trucks a day at up to 80 km/h.

On 9 February 2022 the World Book of Records, a UK organisation, certified it as the world’s longest highway tunnel above 10,000 feet. The ministry’s factsheet records the ceremony in New Delhi, where the BRO’s director general received the award.

Fire, air and the escape tube

The electrical and mechanical package includes semi-transverse ventilation, fire-fighting run from a SCADA system (control-room software that operates the equipment from a distance), lighting and monitoring. The ministry lists a telephone every 150 m, a fire hydrant every 60 m, CCTV with automatic incident detection every 250 m, air-quality monitoring every 1 km, and evacuation lighting and exit signs every 25 m. Fire-rated dampers, the flaps that stop smoke and flame travelling through ducts, sit every 50 m, and barriers close entry at both portals.

The escape route is built into the main tube. The ministry describes a fireproof egress tunnel, 3.6 m by 2.25 m, inside the main tunnel itself. Satish Paretkar of Afcons, the Indian partner in the construction joint venture, told Indian Infrastructure magazine in December 2020 that it is the first Indian tunnel with its escape tunnel inside the main one rather than alongside it. The magazine reports 18 openings, one every 500 m, and a turning cavern every 2.2 km.

A June 2000 decision and a 2017 breakthrough

The defence ministry dates the decision to build a strategic tunnel under Rohtang to 3 June 2000, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister. The foundation stone for the access road to the south portal was laid on 26 May 2002.

Indian Infrastructure fills in the rest. It says the BRO was given the job on 6 May 2002, that a design contract went to Australia’s SMEC in May 2007 with completion then set for 2014, and that the construction contract went to a joint venture of Afcons and Austria’s Strabag in September 2009, after the Cabinet Committee on Security cleared the project. The first blast came in 2010. The magazine also says the project was conceived in 1983, a date the government’s own releases do not use. Strabag’s project page lists the BRO as client, a construction period of 2009 to 2020 and a contract value of €348 million.

Excavation was by drill and blast under the New Austrian Tunnelling Method, a way of supporting the rock as the tunnel advances. Rohtang closes in winter, so the north end could not be reached for part of every year. Indian Infrastructure reports that about a quarter of the digging was done from the north and three quarters from the south. The two headings met on 15 October 2017.

The worst ground was the 587 m Seri Nalah fault zone near the south portal. Paretkar described crushed rock with water pouring in at up to 8,000 litres a minute, repeated collapses, and almost four years to get through. A PIB backgrounder of 14 January 2026 adds that winter temperatures reached minus 25 degrees Celsius outside while the tunnel interior sometimes reached 45 degrees, and that seepage from Seri Nala once flooded the tunnel. The Cabinet renamed the Rohtang Tunnel after Vajpayee on 24 December 2019.

The bill, in four figures

Indian Infrastructure gives the estimates in order: ₹500 crore in 2000, ₹950 crore in 2005, and a contract value of ₹1,458 crore at the 2009 award. It puts the final cost between ₹3,200 crore and ₹3,500 crore.

Modi’s inauguration speech used two of the same figures. He said the 2005 assessment was about ₹950 crore and that, because of delays, the tunnel was finished at more than ₹3,200 crore (₹32 billion), over three times as much.

The speech also assigned the delay. Modi said work stalled after the Vajpayee government left power and that only 1,300 m of the tunnel had been built by 2013 to 2014. On 18 May 2024, the Congress candidate Vikramaditya Singh told a rally in Lahaul that Sonia Gandhi, then chair of the National Advisory Council, laid the tunnel’s foundation stone on 28 June 2010, that Manmohan Singh’s government provided the budget, and that 75 per cent of the work was done by 2014. The two statements measure different things and neither came with a progress report in the coverage reviewed here.

Deaths during construction

Neither the defence ministry’s factsheet nor the PIB releases give a total for deaths during construction, and this article found no official count. Three incidents are on the record in press reports.

A cloudburst at Kangni Nallah, 15 km from Manali, hit the camps of labourers building the road up to the tunnel in August 2003. The Tribune’s first report said 26 bodies had been recovered and 34 people were missing. In March 2011 an avalanche killed two employees of the Strabag-Afcons joint venture, a driver and a supervisor, when frozen snow hit their vehicle; the Manali DSP told PTI that a case under section 304(A), causing death by negligence, had been registered against the company. In July 2011 a cloudburst at Fingri Nullah, on the approach road to the south portal, washed away labourers’ camps. They had been building a 120 m snow gallery, and the Tribune’s first report said eight people were swept away, with two bodies found and six missing.

What changed for Lahaul

The defence ministry’s factsheet says Ladakh has two ways in: from Kashmir through Kargil, and from Himachal over Rohtang. With Rohtang shut for almost six months, the only winter link was through Kashmir. The 1999 Kargil fighting took place on the heights above that Kashmir road. Trains now run into the valley on the line described in the railway to Kashmir, which crosses the Chenab bridge.

The factsheet also says the tunnel will help security forces with regular supplies and patrolling. Modi, at the inauguration, said it would cut the Manali to Keylong travel time by three to four hours.

Tourist numbers rose quickly. The Tribune reported on 8 January 2021 that fewer than one lakh tourists had reached Lahaul and Spiti in 2020, the pandemic year, and that 5,450 vehicles crossed the tunnel on 27 December 2020. On 27 December 2023 it quoted the district’s superintendent of police, Mayank Chaudhary, as saying 29.18 lakh tourists had come through the tunnel so far that year, against 26 lakh the year before.

Police counts of vehicles, as the press reported them, run as follows:

• 2021: 7,99,941 vehicles, both directions.
• 2022: 12,73,699 vehicles, with a one-day record of 19,383 on 26 December 2022 and 16 days above 10,000.
• 2023: 12,41,150 vehicles, according to police sources cited by ETV Bharat.
• 2025: 16,40,719 vehicles, from the same ETV Bharat report, which adds 7,82,976 between January and May 2026.

The design traffic is 4,500 vehicles a day, so the 2022 record day was more than four times it. On 22 May 2026 the Tribune reported that Kiran Bhadana, the deputy commissioner of Lahaul and Spiti, had written to his Kullu counterpart Anurag Chander asking for a detailed safety audit. Chander said the audit was on the cards, and the paper’s sources said no full safety audit had reportedly been done for a long time. On 9 June 2026 ETV Bharat reported that the Lahaul-Spiti and Kullu administrations were drafting a daily cap with the BRO, and quoted Bhadana describing “overflowing vehicular traffic”.

Snow, avalanches and the north portal

The tunnel stays open, but the roads at each end do not always. During construction Paretkar counted more than 20 avalanche areas around the portals, and Strabag lists avalanches and monsoon landslides among the project’s hazards. On 3 February 2026 an avalanche came down near the snow gallery at the north portal and blocked National Highway 3, the BRO said.

Beyond the tunnel, the Manali to Leh highway still closes in winter. The Tribune reported in April 2023, during the BRO director general’s inspection tour, that it shuts to vehicles near Baralacha La because of heavy snow.

Zojila and Shinku La

Two more tunnels aim at the same problem on other roads to Ladakh. The Zojila tunnel runs between Baltal and Minamarg on National Highway 1, on the Kashmir side. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari witnessed the breakthrough of its main tunnel at Minamarg on 9 June 2026, according to PIB. The release describes a bi-directional tunnel of nearly 14 km costing about ₹6,800 crore, at altitudes of 2,900 m to 3,310 m, and says it will cut the Sonamarg to Minamarg trip from nearly two hours to about 30 minutes. PIB’s January 2026 backgrounder puts its completion at 2028.

Shinku La is on the Himachal side, a 4.1 km twin-tube tunnel at about 15,800 feet on the Nimu to Padum to Darcha road. Modi launched its construction on 26 July 2024, Business Standard reported. The BRO is building it for ₹1,681 crore, which the Cabinet Committee on Security approved in February 2023. Business Standard said the work was projected to take two years, and no opening date appears in the reports reviewed here. The BRO’s director general said in April 2023 that it would link 36 villages of the Zanskar valley with 136 villages of the Lahaul valley.