The highest fatality rate in the Indian army is not in its infantry battalions massed on the border with Pakistan. It is on another front-line, closer to China, among the army's high-altitude road builders.

At a meeting in Itanagar, the hill-station capital of Arunachal Pradesh, in India's far north-east, Lieutenant General MC Badhani, the director-general of the Border Roads Organisation, gives a grave account of the gruelling lives his units lead in freezing conditions. The road builders suffer high stress and loneliness. Cut off from their families, they can usually only manage two to three years in the desolate Himalayan region bordering China. The division lost nine men during one 10-day period because of the conditions. It is not only the soldiers' lives that are cut short: in the sub-zero temperatures, earthmovers lastonly a third of the time they are meant to.

Yet the job of India's military road engineers is likely to become more testing.