Will he ever finish this nightmarish road? In an office, cluttered with maps, surveys and land profiles, Lalrinngheta, 50, often wonders. A soft-spoken engineer, he has lost count of the sleepless nights he has had since he started work on “the job of his career”, a road connecting India to south-east Asia via Myanmar, at an estimated cost of $115m. “The stakes are huge,” he says. He receives frequent calls on his mobile from senior officials or high-ranking military in Delhi asking when the road will open. The authorities are growing impatient. So, regardless of the mudslides and malaria, Lalrinngheta must finish the job by 2017.

In his large insect-infested office, he has had a safe set into the wall, to keeps the workers’ wages, paperwork for subcontractors, and his most faithful friends in the battle against the jungle: his maps. The construction-project headquarters are perched on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere, where the emerald-green vegetation stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions.

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Lawngtlai is a dead-end town on the edge of Mizoram state (population 1.1 million), itself at the extremity of India’s north-east region. For centuries Mizoram has survived in impoverished isolation. Almost encircled by the Burmese border on one side and Bangladesh on the other, it depends on federal government subsidies. However, the road is expected to change all that.

On leaving Lawngtlai, the highway will slice through the jungle for 90km before reaching the Burmese border. Some 130km further on it will reach either Kaletwa or Paletwa. There, passengers and containers will transfer to ships, travelling 160km down river Kaladan to Sittwe, with strategic access to the Bay of Bengal. The port is being developed with Indian funding. In one fell swoop the isolated north-east will be connected to prosperous south-east Asia, once the whole project, costing an estimated $1.3bn, is complete. Indian Prime minister Narendra Modi then hopes to connect Gujarat, in western India, to Mizoram, finally delivering on the Look East policy originally framed in the 1990s.

It is 6am and Lalrinngheta is preparing for a site inspection. At the gate to the new “road”, guarded by a security man, he stops to admire his work, striking a pose in his cowboy hat. An asphalt highway is still a remote dream. At the moment the road is a swathe of ochre earth cutting through the hillside. To achieve even this much, the engineer has had to fight all the obstacles the jungle has put in his way: water shortages, malaria, typhoid, delays in obtaining building permits and occasional hostility from locals.

Every metre has come at a high cost. Around 30 workers have lost their lives due to malaria or accidents. The workers have lost count of the number of times they have had to start again after a mudslide engulfed the road. Lalrinngheta knows, having noted all of them, 127 in the past year alone. “The soil is very loose here,” he explains. “We constantly have to shore up the causeway and the banks on either side. We could make broader cuttings, with a gentler slope, but we have to comply with the standards set by Delhi … and the budget. So we just have to get on with it.” After five years on the project he has started fine-tuning his magnum opus, shaving a few degrees off bends, digging tunnels to drain monsoon run-off, which is particularly severe here.

Despite it all, he carries on. Building National Highway-502A is like a game of chess. To overcome an obstacle, strategic retreat may sometimes be best. In the early days, the workers laboured under police supervision to protect them from attacks by local tribes, angry at the lack of compensation for their loss of land. But how could the government buy up common land? Local farmers practise jhum, a form of slash and burn, cultivating a patch of land then moving on.

The proposed route of national highway 502A Photograph: Guardian graphics/Le Monde

This system of collective ownership caused confusion, so the autonomous district council, controlled by tribal communities, started issuing property deeds. Unfortunately, there were so many that they added up to more than the total area of Mizoram. The local anti-corruption bureau has opened an inquiry. In the meantime opposition has slackened and work on the highway can continue. In some cases, however, such as when the cemetery was threatened by a mudslide, the government moved graves and paid each affected family about$1,500 in compensation.

On and on, regardless of the cost, even without the requisite permits. How could a bureaucrat at a desk in Delhi possibly understand that delays with paperwork can waste precious time before the monsoon season starts and cause delays of weeks? Machines grind to a halt and workers still have to be paid because they have nowhere else to go. One delay leads to another. It takes four days to replace a faulty part, flown in from Singapore, for an earth-mover. It’s the same with cement, lorry loads of it being shipped in from Meghalaya state, or fuel from Assam, both of which border on Mizoram. Almost the only thing the engineers have found on the spot is rock. Trucks fetch stones from the banks of a river, tipping them into huge crushers.

When Lalrinngheta’s deputy, Lalremruata, goes home he sometimes falls prey to doubts their project. He remembers catching crabs in the river as a child, walking for several days through the jungle to reach the next village. “Isn’t the road going to wreck this green haven? Will it really benefit Mizoram and its people?” he asks. What he does know, though, is that with the new highway, rare tree species and wildlife will be under threat, because it will be easier to harvest them.

We can accept a road – newcomers will come in dribs and drabs and it will benefit development – but never a railway

He tries to shrug off his doubts by thoughts that once the construction job is finished he might open a shop on the border. “I’m very keen on anything electrical. Down there, on the border people will always be needing equipment, buying generators, switches and lightbulbs,” Lalremruata explains. He has already promised his wife that when the road is open he will take her and the children to Myanmar, to show them the sea. The highway will halve the distance to Kolkata, down to 930km, bringing the heart of India closer to the north-east.

The highway is still a topic of debate for the Mizo, the largest tribe in the region, which gave its name to Mizoram and fought for independence until 1986. “We’re in danger of being assimilated by foreigners, or losing our language and culture if we open up too much to the outside world,” says Lalmuanpuia Punte, a militant who still advocates independence. “We can accept a road, because newcomers will only come in dribs and drabs and it will benefit development, but never a railway.”

At the other end of NH-502A the Bru, or Reang, people have already started to adjust. Eighty or so families have moved their bamboo huts down the hill to rebuild them at the side of the currently unfinished road. Wild pigs slumber between the stilts supporting the huts. At nightfall women, decked out with bracelets and nose rings, bring baskets of wild fruit back from the woods. “The road enables us to sell what we gather to shoppers at Lawngtlai, without bothering with middlemen,” one says with a big smile. Her neighbour shrugs. “How are we to set up shop? We have no money to invest, less still to buy a scooter and drive down the road,” he says. Their outlook is all the more uncertain because they do not own the land they have occupied. Sitting on straw mats we talked to several villagers about how they pictured “a road full of lorries”.

A schoolteacher, who recently moved into a “model village”, a scheme hatched by politicians located just a step away from Myanmar, is sceptical. “They promise us jobs, but we speak neither Hindi nor Bengali and certainly not English. How could we get work?” he asks. The people living here, at the end of the road, are not interested in Asia or the Indian Ocean, just what will change in their daily lives. Road builders have warned them that once the highway is open they will need to show their papers and go through customs when visiting Myanmar to visit relatives.

For the villagers, NH-502A will bring a new frontier.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde