Zoji-la Tunnel will connect which of the following places ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Srinagar and Leh. Zoji La is the pass at about 3,580 metres on National Highway 1 between Srinagar and Leh, linking the Kashmir Valley on its west to the Dras and Suru valleys to its north-east and the Indus valley beyond. It is the choke point of that entire corridor: heavy snow shuts it through the winter months, and when it is shut, Ladakh's only reliable land route to the rest of the country is severed. The tunnel is being driven beneath the pass precisely to remove that seasonal break — a bore of about 14 kilometres, approved in January 2018, with construction inaugurated by the Prime Minister in May 2018 at a cost of the order of 930 million US dollars, and projected when complete to be the longest bidirectional tunnel in Asia. The headline gain is time as well as reliability: crossing the pass currently takes over three hours and the tunnel is expected to reduce it to about fifteen minutes. All three wrong options name real tunnel corridors, which is what makes the question a genuine test rather than a giveaway — Manali to Lahaul-Spiti is the Atal Tunnel under the Rohtang Pass, opened in October 2020, and Srinagar to Jammu is served by the Jawahar Tunnel under the Banihal Pass and by the newer tunnels on the NH-44 alignment. Only one corridor runs through Zoji La, and that is Srinagar to Leh.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) That is the Atal Tunnel, bored under the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh and opened in October 2020, which gives Lahaul-Spiti all-weather access from Manali. Same idea — a tunnel replacing a snowbound pass — but a different state, a different pass and a different highway.  (b) Not a corridor at all. Manali is in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu in the Jammu region; no single tunnel connects them, and the two lie on separate highway systems. The option works only by borrowing 'Manali' from one real answer and 'Jammu' from another.  (c) A real and heavily tunnelled corridor, but a different one — NH-44, where the Jawahar Tunnel under the Banihal Pass and the newer Chenani–Nashri and Banihal–Qazigund tunnels carry traffic between the Jammu region and the Kashmir Valley. Zoji La lies beyond Srinagar, on the road onward to Ladakh.

Concept: Ladakh's connectivity problem is a matter of passes. Two road routes reach Leh: the Srinagar–Kargil–Leh road on NH-1, which must cross Zoji La at about 3,580 metres, and the Manali–Leh road, which crosses several passes higher still. Both close under snow for a large part of the year, which has historically left Ladakh reachable only by air in winter — a serious matter for a region with a long disputed frontier and a permanent military presence. India's answer has been a programme of high-altitude tunnelling that replaces a pass crossing with a bore beneath it: the Atal Tunnel under Rohtang on the Manali axis, opened in 2020; the Zojila tunnel on the Srinagar axis, under construction; and the Sela tunnel in Arunachal Pradesh on the road to Tawang. Each converts a road that is seasonal into one that is all-weather, cuts hours from the journey and removes the avalanche risk of the open pass. The same logic drove the tunnels on the Jammu–Srinagar highway, which is why that corridor supplies this question's most plausible distractor.

State PCS 2024 Q145 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q145 — Geography PYQ with Answer