The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) approved India's first underwater road-cum-rail tunnel under the Brahmaputra River in Assam on February 14, 2026, at a total cost of ₹18,662 crore. The 33.7-km-long Greenfield project will connect Gohpur (on NH-15) with Numaligarh (on NH-715), reducing the travel distance from 240 km to just 34 km and cutting travel time from six hours to approximately 20 minutes.

The centrepiece is a 15.79-km twin-tube tunnel built using advanced Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) technology beneath the Brahmaputra River — only the second such underwater combined road-rail tunnel in the world. One tube will carry road traffic (two lanes each) and the other will carry rail infrastructure. The project will be executed on an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) model and is expected to generate approximately 80 lakh person-days of direct and indirect employment.

Strategically, the tunnel will significantly boost connectivity to Assam's tea and petroleum-producing regions, improve logistics and reduce freight costs, and enhance India's security infrastructure in the Northeast. It will also serve as a critical disaster resilience link for a region prone to devastating floods that regularly cut off surface road connectivity across the Brahmaputra. The project aligns with the government's Purvodaya vision for accelerated development of eastern India.