It’s raining money in New Delhi. Not the literal kind, though for the contractors involved, it might as well be. The Union Cabinet is reportedly sitting on a ₹40,000 crore stack of infrastructure approvals, and the crown jewel is a ₹19,000 crore tunnel bored deep beneath the Brahmaputra river.

The timing is, of course, purely coincidental. Assam is heading toward the polls, and nothing says "vote for us" quite like a massive, multi-billion-rupee hole in the ground.

Let’s look at the math. Nineteen thousand crore rupees. That’s roughly $2.3 billion for a single underwater stretch connecting Gohpur and Numaligarh. In a region where the river behaves less like a body of water and more like a shifting, temperamental inland sea, this isn’t just civil engineering. It’s a high-stakes gamble with taxpayer cash.

The Brahmaputra is a nightmare for engineers. It’s prone to massive siltation, aggressive erosion, and seismic tantrums. Digging a tunnel under it requires specialized Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) that cost more than some small-nation GDPs. These aren’t your neighborhood backhoes. They’re massive, subterranean factories that chew through earth and spit out finished tunnels. But when you’re dealing with the soft, unpredictable sediment of the Brahmaputra basin, those machines can get stuck. And when a ₹500-crore machine gets stuck under a river, the bill doesn't just go up—it explodes.

But hey, logic rarely wins elections. Steel and concrete do.

The project is being pitched as a strategic necessity. It’s about "connectivity" and "national security." Those are the magic words that bypass the usual fiscal scrutiny. If you wrap a project in the flag, nobody asks why we’re spending ₹19,000 crore on a tunnel when the state’s existing road network still crumbles every time a heavy monsoon hits. It’s the classic tech-solutionist trap: why fix a thousand small problems when you can build one giant, shiny one?

There’s a specific kind of friction here that the brochures won't mention. The environmental cost of boring through a sensitive river ecosystem is immense. We’re talking about disrupting aquifers and dealing with millions of tons of excavated muck. Then there’s the trade-off. For the price of this one tunnel, you could likely overhaul the entire public healthcare infrastructure of upper Assam. You could modernize every school. You could actually solve the annual flood crisis instead of just building a very expensive pipe to hide from it.

But a new hospital doesn't look as good on a billboard as a 3D-rendered cross-section of a "futuristic" underwater corridor.

This is the "Prestige Project" playbook. You see it in Saudi Arabia’s desert mirrors and London’s failing garden bridges. The goal isn’t utility; it’s optics. In the context of poll-bound Assam, the tunnel is a massive, underwater campaign flyer. It’s a way to signal that the center is "investing" in the Northeast, even if that investment is localized to a single, high-risk engineering feat that won't be finished for a decade.

The rest of the ₹40,000 crore package is more of the same—bits and bobs of rail and road that have been languishing in "pending" folders for years, suddenly dusted off just as the campaign buses are getting their tires rotated. It’s a frantic scramble to commit the funds before the Model Code of Conduct kicks in and the government's checkbook gets frozen.

What we’re really looking at is a stress test for the country's fiscal health. We’re doubling down on mega-projects while the global economy is looking shaky. We’re choosing the most expensive possible way to cross a river because it sounds cooler in a press release.

It’s easy to get caught up in the scale of it. The sheer audacity of drilling under one of the world’s most volatile rivers is, admittedly, a hell of a story. But once the ribbon is cut and the politicians have moved on to the next cycle, we’re left with the maintenance. Underwater tunnels aren't "set it and forget it." They are hungry, expensive beasts that require constant pumping, ventilation, and monitoring.

As the Cabinet prepares to green-light this spending spree, the question isn’t whether we can build it. With enough money and enough imported TBMs, you can build almost anything. The real question is whether anyone bothered to ask if a ₹19,000 crore tunnel is the best way to help a farmer in Gohpur get his crops to market, or if we’re just paying billions for the privilege of saying we did it.

One wonders if the tunnel will be deep enough to bury the debt it’s creating.