The Ropeway Revolution

WAY PAST THE blue gorges of the Sutlej, the wide grey chasm of the Beas is greeted by the parallel four-laner, National High­way-21, connecting Chandigarh to Manali. At a hairpin bend over the Pandoh dam 90km short of Manali, two green trolleys or cable cars glide effortlessly on either direction at six metres per second to accomplish the 800m journey in under three minutes. It’s a sight to behold, and for the locals, a winning combination in terms of mobility and business. The Pandoh ropeway connects NH-21 with the Mata Baglamukhi temple in Bakhli village on the other side of River Beas. Lala Ram, 43, a member of the Baglamukhi Temple Commit­tee and a boat operator by profession, is upbeat since the ropeway opened its doors to the public on December 3, 2024. “We’re seeing new tourists every day and we hope our village soon becomes a tourism hub. Many of our villagers have opened shops to cater to the heavy tourist footfalls,” he claims, adding that the new mode of transport scores over the highway, which takes a good 40 min­utes to cover. In the vicinity, the only star-rated hotel in Pandoh, SPT Clarks and Suites, has seen a 10 per cent spike in guests after the ropeway came into being. “This ropeway has become a mag­net for tourists as this is a transit point to Manali and Leh,” says the hotel’s general manager Deepak Thakur. While a two-way ticket costs ₹250 for tourists, it’s as low as ₹50 for the locals, informs the Mata Baglamukhi Ropeway resident manager Kush Vaidya. “Our ropeway connects the two villages of Hatoun and Bakhli on either side of the river and has come as a boon for the local vil­lagers who are now seeing greater tourist footfalls and improved connectivity,” he elaborates.

Rural connectivity in far-flung areas, particularly on hilly ter­rain, and tourism have always been central to choosing ropeways as a major mode of transport. But these glass-cabin gliders will soon be dotting city skylines to decongest the roads in urban In­dia. A clutch of such projects is already underway, and in August, the Kashi Ropeway project in Varanasi is slated to be operational. Once complete, it will reduce time between Banaras Cantonment Railway Station and the Kashi Vishwanath temple from an hour to a mere 17 minutes—a win-win for locals, pilgrims and visitors. The chokepoints in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constitu­ency are numerous and the 3.75km-long ropeway promises to remove them with a capacity of 3,000 passengers per hour per direction, operating 16 hours a day. It will have 153 cable cars with a capacity of 10 passengers shuttling back and forth. While the scale is astounding, Prime Minister Modi calls it “an amazing con­fluence of faith and technology,” and is confident “it will emerge as an employment generator in the city.”

Again, take the hilly capital of Himachal Pradesh, Shimla, which is poised to develop Asia’s longest ropeway at 13.79km, connecting Tara Devi to Sanjauli, a sprawl of about 60km, inte­grating 13 key stations. For one, the city is bursting at its seams and the tourist influx adds to the chaos. “The ₹1,734 crore proj­ect will greatly reduce road congestion and boost tourism,” says Rohit Thakur, chief general manager, Ropeway and Rapid Trans­port System Development Corporation (RTDC), Himachal Pradesh. Thakur, a mechanical engineer by training and a for­mer ropeway inspector (every division in the state has a ropeway inspector who performs regular project audits) for numerous projects, would know. After all, ropeway networks overcome spatial limitations as infrastructure seamlessly integrates into skylines without the need for acquiring land since operations remain suspended high above settlements. “Ropeways are most convenient for last-mile connectivity since they have a very low footprint. Leave aside stations, for towers, you need just a 5x5m area, which makes it very convenient to construct without any rehabilitation issues. Moreover, obstacles can easily be crossed— increase the height of the tower and soar over buildings or gorges or trees.”

RTDC has simultaneously floated tenders for the longest rope­way in the world connecting Shimla to Parwanoo in the foothills, a road distance of about 83km, with 40km cables laid across 11 stations. The project will cost ₹5,602 crore. “The ropeway will be set up under the PPP mode and the target for completion is 2030. Upon completion, the ropeway will ferry 25 lakh passengers to and fro annually,” says Thakur. It is expected to reach its peak ca­pacity of a crore passengers by 2063. For the record, the longest ropeway in the world is in Bolivia, spanning approximately 32km.

Open reliably learns the Karnataka government, too, has shown interest in ropeways as a last-mile connector for the Ben­galuru Metro, that is, to connect Metro terminals to neighbour­hoods in their vicinity through a series of ropeway sub-stations. The initiative, when functional, will take a major load off Benga­luru’s streets, a sore point for the Silicon City’s residents.

Up north again, the talk of the town is the 5.4km Dehradun-Mussoorie ropeway, which will go on stream in 2026 and will be the first tourism-cum-urban mobility ropeway in the country. With 72 cable cars, the ropeway will be the third longest in the world in terms of monocable detachable technology (a monocable detachable ropeway uses a single, endless rope for both carrying and hauling cabins, allowing them to detach from the rope at stations for boarding and disembarking). “After conducting extensive traffic studies, we know that about 3.8 million trips take place between Dehradun and Mussoorie each year. We’re eyeing 30 per cent of that traffic,” says Syed Junaid Altaf, CEO and director, Mussoorie Skycar Pvt Ltd, adding that in the second year of operation, he expects a ridership north of a million people.

Altaf hails from Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and is a self-professed “mountain man”, making ropeways run in his veins. An investment banker by profession, he got curious about the cable car busi­ness and when tenders were floated for the Patnitop Cable Car in J&K in 2016, he won the bid along with his strategic ropeway developer, POMA, one of the two largest global companies in the busi­ness apart from the Doppelmayr/ Gara­venta Group. They named the ropeway ‘Skyview by Empyrean’ and kickstarted operations in 2019. Today, it spans 2.8km, making it the highest ropeway in India in terms of ground clearance.

The Skyview ropeway project follows a mixed trajectory for faster breakeven, since in the normal run, typical ropeway projects break even anywhere between seven and 10 years. “We don’t just build ropeways but an integrated retail and entertainment destination around it—almost like an alpine village is designed—it is experiential. That way, we can break even faster,” says Altaf. He claims that the Dehradun-Mussoorie Skycar is being developed along the same lines with convention facilities, restaurants, banquets, hotels and entertainment zones.

Altaf is also the executive director of FIL Industries, the flag­ship company that runs the ropeways, apart from interests in F&B, tourism, hospitality and agriculture. Recently, FIL Indus­tries, POMA SAS and SRM Engineering LLP as a consortium bagged the 3.8km-long Yamunotri Ropeway Project, connecting the Yamunotri shrine to Kharsali town in Uttarakhand, reducing travel time from two hours to just 10-15 minutes. The project will be executed in two phases and is expected to cost ₹200 crore in the first phase and ₹50 crore in the second phase. The project is planned at an altitude of over 10,000 feet and is part of the Char Dham Yatra, which also includes the Kedarnath, Badrinath and Gangotri shrines.

IN APRIL, ADANI Enterprises bagged the prestigious bid to develop the Kedarnath ropeway connecting Sonprayag, Gaurikund and Kedarnath. The 13km ropeway is expected to get a large number of pilgrims as it promises to reduce travel time to barely 36 minutes from eight-nine hours. The ropeway will have a capac­ity to transport 18,000 people per day, or around 32 lakh per year. The ropeway project, based on tri-cable detachable gondola (3S) technology, will be completed in six years and Adani Enterprises will have the right to operate, maintain and collect the fare for 35 years after the project gets on stream.

Again, in Uttarakhand, the Centre has ap­proved the construction of a 12.4km ropeway connecting Govindghat to the Hemkund Sahib gurdwara for ₹2,730.13 crore. At the moment, the route is a 21km uphill trek from Govindghat and once constructed, the ropeway will give pilgrims to Hemkund Sahib and tourists to the neighbouring Valley of Flowers all-weather last-mile connectivity, and a much-needed breather.

While ropeway contracts are being awarded to private players via the public-private partner­ship (PPP) mode (a collaborative arrangement between a government entity and a private sec­tor company to deliver pubic assets or services) or EPC (a project delivery approach where a single contractor is responsible for the Engineer­ing, Procurement and Construction phases of a project) mode, the government alone is step­ping on the gas too with a host of new ropeway projects across several states. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has picked up the line to improve accessibility to remote and hilly regions, promote tourism and enhance last-mile connectivity.

The skies of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, As­sam, Uttar Pradesh, J&K, and Uttarakhand are humming with cable-car activity. The National Highways Logistics Management Limited (NHLML), a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), has been tasked with im­plementing these ropeway networks under the Central govern­ment’s Parvatmala Pariyojana scheme, announced in the Union Budget 2022-23. Among the most significant proposals are the 11.6km ropeway connecting Baltal to the Amarnath shrine in J&K; the 2.62km ropeway from Pamba to Sabarimala temple in Kerala; the 3.21km ropeway to the Parvathimalai temple in Tamil Nadu; the 6.45km ropeway connecting Amer and Nahargarh forts in Jaipur, Rajasthan; and similarly, a 1.41km ropeway to Shivneri fort in Maharashtra, among others.

The government is keen on ropeway as an alternative mode of transport since it is green, efficient and reduces distances consider­ably. In 2023, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari took a delegation to the leading international fair for alpine technologies at Innsbruck, Austria. He said that under the Parvatmala Pariyojana, the government plans “to develop 250-plus projects with a ropeway length of 1,200-plus kilometres over the next five years (until 2028)”. The minister added that the focus of the government was on PPP mode under the hybrid annuity model with 60 per cent contribution from the Centre. He also said India would promote the manufacturing of ropeway components under the Make in India initiative.

While localisation of manufacturing is a noble endeavour, Rohit Thakur hands out a caveat. He contends that in a typical ropeway project, electro-mechanical components make up 70 per cent and civil components cover the remaining 30 per cent. “We don’t have a problem with the 30 per cent civil components to make in India and of the remaining 70 per cent, maybe we can construct towers in India, not other components, because to make those we need scale, which we do not have yet,” says Thakur. But Thakur holds that soon India would be making 40 per cent of the ropeway components in-house.

Altaf of FIL Industries could not agree more and says, “Our part­ner POMA now has an Indian subsidiary which will manufacture components locally. This is where Make in India will get a boost.”

With more projects and players in the fray than ever before, the ropeway industry is rapidly evolving. “You need trained op­erators, guidelines for both operators and asset owners,” says Altaf, hinting that in the business of safety, which ropeways are, guidelines and daily checks and balances are paramount. “Our entire team is certified and we have annual audits by POMA, there are daily checks and once the ropeway shuts each night, there is maintenance work,” adds Altaf. He also offers a peek into how the industry may pan out in terms of ownership: “In Europe, asset owners are different from asset operators. That will happen in India too. There will be people who invest in the asset as it pro­vides cash flow for a certain number of years, and there will be specialised companies who set up shop and become operators. Today, we are owner-operators, but 10 years down the line, we might be two companies, owners and operators.”

Ropeways function fully on electricity, minimising ecological harm associated with gasoline or diesel. Solar panels are now be­ing integrated within the infrastructure to make the total shift to renewable energy, enabling carbon-neutral, emission-free mobility.

Seeing ropeways transform India’s skylines from the bend of a Himalayan highway by the river Beas, it is hard to comprehend the gravity of change. From his dashboard, Mata Baglamukhi Ropeway resident manager Kush Vaidya once again looks up to the dangling cables across the deep abyss of the Pandoh dam saying, “Our cable cars consume 500-600 units of power daily. We may soon opt for the solar option.” As for the sun, in Pandoh at least, there is enough of it to transform the lay of the land.

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