Underground Metro Tunnelling

I joined the project management team at Larsen & Toubro on an underground stretch of the Chennai Metro, where a tunnel boring machine chews out the alignment a few metres at a time and everything else on site exists to keep it moving.

My work was coordination. Sequencing the day, allocating the workforce, and keeping logistics a step ahead of the machine. A TBM does not wait: if segments, grout or crew are not staged by the time it needs them, the drive stops, and that time never comes back. So the planning was less about drawing a schedule and more about reconciling the schedule with what the ground actually gave us that morning.

I ended up as the site coordinator, and in practice the face of the company on the ground: the point where the crews underground, the planning office and anyone visiting the site all met. It taught me how to hold a plan and a reality in mind at once, and how much of delivery is simply being the person who answers.