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Formerly Janakpur Engineering College (JEC)Affiliated to Tribhuvan University

Civil engineering and infrastructure

Materials, bridges, tunnels, dams, disaster engineering and the codes behind them.

20 stories · 15 Aug 2026 to 9 Oct 2026

Which civil engineering developments matter most to a student in Nepal right now?

Nepal builds on steep slopes, in an active seismic zone, beside rivers fed by glaciers, and it is building fast: roads, tunnels, hydropower and housing. The engineering news that matters most here is about building on that ground safely and cheaply: lower-carbon materials, better ways of predicting slope and flood failure, faster bridge and tunnel construction, and the codes that turn those lessons into rules. Each story in this section is told in plain terms with its source, followed by what it changes for someone studying for a BCE.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

M7.7 earthquake damages buildings and roads across central Panama

The shallow quake on 9 October collapsed homes, a hotel and church towers and cut off the town of Tonosi by road; early reports listed no deaths.

For you: Older masonry churches and towers collapsed while engineered infrastructure such as the canal kept working, which is the pattern seen in Nepal in 2015. Early reconnaissance after events like this feeds into building codes worldwide. For BCE students, it is a reminder that roads, water plants and schools are lifelines whose failure stretches a disaster out for weeks, and that designing them to keep working after a quake is part of the job.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Jeddah Tower passes 470 m on its way to over 1,000 m

The Saudi supertall has about 118 floors built and targets completion in late 2028, when it should overtake the 828 m Burj Khalifa.

For you: Building to a kilometre pushes concrete pumping, wind engineering, foundation design and construction logistics to their limits, and the methods trickle down to ordinary high-rise work. Many Nepali civil engineers work in Gulf construction, so projects like this are a real employer. Students interested in tall buildings can start with structural analysis, wind and earthquake loads, and high-strength concrete in their BCE courses.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

HS2 finishes central section of 1.4 km Wendover green tunnel

EKFB placed the last of the central section's precast segments on 5 October for the cut-and-cover tunnel that will be buried under landscaped earth.

For you: Not every tunnel needs a boring machine. A green tunnel is a cheaper, shallow alternative that limits noise and lets farmland or forest return on top, an approach that could suit Nepal's expressways through towns and protected areas. Precast segments made in a factory and lifted into place also show how off-site construction improves speed and quality, which links to reinforced concrete design and construction planning in BCE.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

TBM Caroline finishes 2.2 km power tunnel under the Thames early

National Grid's new 400 kV cable tunnel between Tilbury and Gravesend broke through on 27 September, 49 days ahead of schedule.

For you: Segmental tunnel lining, slurry TBMs and shaft construction are the same techniques used in hydropower headrace tunnels and in underground works planned around Kathmandu. A short cable tunnel like this also shows that tunnelling is not only for roads and railways, because power utilities need it too. BCE students who study soil and rock mechanics, concrete design and construction planning will meet every one of these steps, from shaft sinking to ring building, in their courses.

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Civil & infrastructure · 6 min read

Adani and Druk Green sign deal for 770 MW Chamkharchhu-I in Bhutan

The peaking run-of-river plant in Zhemgang district is due to start construction in early 2027, with power for Bhutan in winter and India in summer.

For you: Bhutan and Nepal share the same geography and the same business model of exporting hydropower to India. Projects like this create years of work in headworks, desanding basins, headrace tunnels and powerhouse caverns, much of it done by South Asian engineers. Understanding peaking run-of-river design, joint-venture structures and cross-border power deals helps BCE graduates see where Nepal's own hydropower sector is heading and what skills it will hire for.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Golden Gate Bridge begins final phase of its seismic retrofit

Work on the towers and suspension spans started with night lane closures on 5 October.

For you: Retrofitting an old structure while it carries traffic is a growing share of civil engineering work worldwide, and Nepal has many ageing bridges in seismic zones. Energy dissipation devices, performance-based design and the idea of a lifeline structure that must stay open after a quake are advanced topics that build on the structural analysis and steel design taught in BCE. They are worth following for anyone interested in bridge engineering.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Sweden's hydrogen steel plant wins Google deal, then needs more cash

Stegra signed a certificate deal with Google in September, then said finishing its Boden green steel plant will cost much more than planned.

For you: Steel and cement are the two materials civil engineers specify most, and both are under pressure to cut emissions. This story shows the economics: low-carbon steel is technically possible but expensive to build at scale. Engineers will increasingly be asked to report the embodied carbon of a design and choose between materials on that basis. Understanding where steel's emissions come from helps BCE students make those choices in practice.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

World Bank lends $110 million to rebuild Sri Lanka roads after cyclone

The money repairs 600 km of roads hit by Cyclone Ditwah, rebuilt with better drainage and landslide protection.

For you: Nepal's hill roads fail for the same reasons: poor drainage, cut-slope failures and undersized culverts. Lenders now attach resilience standards to reconstruction money, so engineers who can design side drains, retaining structures and slope protection, and justify them in a cost estimate, are in demand on donor-funded projects. Highway engineering and hydrology courses in BCE are where those skills start.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Fehmarnbelt immersed tunnel nears its first kilometre

A fourth 217 m, 73,500-tonne element was sunk into place, bringing about 900 m of the 18 km Denmark-Germany tunnel into position.

For you: An immersed tunnel is a different idea from a bored one: the structure is built as large precast concrete boxes in a dry dock and then floated and sunk into place. It brings together precast concrete design, buoyancy and marine construction, and it shows how factory production can control quality on a huge structure. Students in BCE meet the underlying principles in hydraulics, reinforced concrete design and construction management.

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Civil & infrastructure · 6 min read

Diamer-Bhasha dam starts moving pozzolan for its RCC main dam

Extraction of natural pozzolan at Gini began for the 272 m roller-compacted concrete dam, which WAPDA plans as the tallest of its type.

For you: RCC dams are placed like road fill, spread and rolled in thin layers, which makes them faster and cheaper than conventional mass concrete. Replacing part of the cement with local pozzolan cuts cost, heat of hydration and carbon, all serious concerns in a massive dam. Nepal's planned storage projects will weigh the same choices. Concrete technology and hydraulic structures in BCE cover the basics behind these decisions.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Gujarat opens new Gambhira bridge a year after deadly collapse

The replacement two-lane bridge over the Mahi river, with 23 spans and epoxy-coated steel, was built in about a year.

For you: The collapse and the rebuild together are a lesson in bridge life cycle: design, inspection, maintenance and replacement. Nepal also has many bridges from the 1980s carrying far more traffic than they were built for. Corrosion protection, load rating and routine inspection are less visible than new construction, but they decide whether a bridge stays safe. These topics sit in BCE courses on bridge engineering and concrete durability.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Bangladesh approves mostly underground Dhaka metro Line 5 South

The 17.2 km Gabtoli-Dasherkandi line, about 13 km underground, was approved at Tk 45,504 crore with ADB and Korean loans.

For you: Dhaka is building underground metro in soft, waterlogged delta soil, a hard geotechnical problem that Kathmandu's lake-bed clays also pose. Cut-and-cover stations, TBM tunnels under dense cities and dewatering are skills in short supply across South Asia. The doubling of costs on the earlier lines is also a lesson in estimating and risk, which are part of construction management in BCE.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Himalayan rail line breaks through 10.8 km escape tunnel

RVNL connected the second-longest tunnel on the Rishikesh-Karnaprayag line on 11 September, through faulted rock near the Main Boundary Thrust.

For you: This line crosses the same Himalayan fault zones that run through Nepal, so its problems with squeezing, fractured rock are directly relevant to Nepali hydropower and road tunnels. Escape tunnels, NATM support design and rock mass classification are taught in BCE courses and used on every major Nepali tunnel. The repeated schedule slips also show how ground uncertainty changes cost and time, which is part of an engineer's job to estimate.

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Civil & infrastructure · 6 min read

Fortera and MLC plan US plant turning lime-kiln CO2 into cement

The agreement covers a plant of more than 300,000 tonnes a year that captures CO2 from lime making and binds it into a cement product.

For you: This is one of several routes the cement industry is testing to reduce its emissions, and each changes what a site engineer receives in the truck. For BCE students, it is a reminder that cement chemistry is not fixed: hydration, carbonation and strength gain are being redesigned. A new binder must still pass standard strength, setting and durability tests before codes accept it, and that testing is work civil engineers do in materials labs.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

IIT Mandi maps 2,076 glacial lakes in Himachal, flags nine as risky

Satellite analysis found about 710 more lakes than in 2015 and a 28% rise in total lake area, with bridges and villages in hazard zones.

For you: The method behind this study, tracking lakes over time with free satellite images and GIS, is something an engineering student in Nepal can learn and use for a final-year project. Nepal's glacial lake inventory needs regular updating, and bridges, hydropower intakes and roads downstream need flood-path checks. Remote sensing, hydrology and hydraulic modelling together are becoming standard tools for civil engineers working in mountain regions.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Holcim opens Czech calcined clay line to cut cement clinker

A new line at Cizkovice makes over 115,000 tonnes of calcined clay a year, letting Holcim supply about 580,000 tonnes of lower-carbon cement.

For you: Clinker is the most carbon-heavy part of cement, so cutting it is the main lever for greener concrete. Nepal makes most of its own cement and has plenty of clay, which makes calcined clay blends a realistic local option rather than an imported idea. A BCE student who understands supplementary cementitious materials, blended cement standards and how mix design changes with them will be ready for questions that Nepali cement plants and contractors are starting to ask.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Study finds concrete reabsorbs under 10% of cement's CO2

A UCLA-led study says ambient carbonation of concrete offsets far less of cement emissions than earlier estimates of up to 57%.

For you: Carbonation appears in BCE courses mainly as a durability threat, because it lowers the alkalinity that protects steel reinforcement from rust. This study shows the same process cannot be counted on as a climate fix. For students, it is a good example of how cover depth, porosity and mix design control a slow diffusion process, and why claims about green concrete need careful numbers behind them.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Rogun, set to be the world's tallest dam, passes 190 m of 335 m

Webuild says Tajikistan's Rogun dam crest reached 1,155 m above sea level, letting the reservoir rise another 40 m.

For you: Nepal's storage projects, such as Budhigandaki and Dudhkoshi, will face the same questions Rogun answers: staged construction, generating power before the dam is complete, and placing huge volumes of fill to tight compaction specifications. Geotechnical engineering, dam design and construction management are core BCE subjects, and large dam projects employ civil engineers across the region, including in Nepal's own hydropower sector.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

Pakistan installs 286 glacial flood warning systems in the north

The $37 million GLOF-II project covers 24 valleys in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, amid questions over systems that do not work.

For you: Nepal faces the same glacial lake hazards and runs similar sensor networks. The Pakistani experience shows that installing gauges is the easy part; power supply, data links, maintenance budgets and getting a warning to a village in minutes are where systems fail. That is joint work for civil engineers who model floods and design protection works, and for BEI graduates who build sensor, telemetry and alert systems.

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Civil & infrastructure · 5 min read

M7.8 Flores earthquake damages nearly 99,000 homes in Indonesia

A shallow thrust quake off Flores on 15 August killed about 130 people and damaged close to 99,000 houses, with a small tsunami.

For you: Most of the damage was to ordinary houses, the same kind of non-engineered and semi-engineered masonry that failed across Nepal in 2015. The numbers show why seismic design is not only about tall buildings. Nepal's building code, the mandatory rules of thumb for small houses and post-quake damage assessment are all BCE topics, and rapid building safety tagging after an earthquake is real work that young engineers are called to do.

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How these are written

Each story names the outlets it came from and the date, and none of the wording is theirs. If a figure changes after we wrote it, the source link is the place to check.

Researched with AI assistance on 11 October 2026. No member of faculty has reviewed this set yet.

Last reviewed by Imperial College of Engineering. Stories added 11 October 2026. Each story carries its own source's date.