Dhaka is one of the densest cities on earth, and the surface has little room left to give. The elevated first phase of the metro proved what mass transit can do for the city — the phases that follow will have to go underground, beneath roads that cannot be closed and neighbourhoods that cannot be moved.
Bored tunnelling in Dhaka's soft alluvial ground demands earth-pressure-balance machines, careful settlement control and — above all — crews who have done it before. That experience does not exist in Bangladesh yet at scale. It is exactly what our founders spent their careers building in Singapore, Japan and Malaysia.
Zen Tunnel Engineering was founded for this moment: to bring home the TBM pilots, mechanical superintendents and tunnel crews the coming underground era will need, and to train the next generation of Bangladeshi tunnellers alongside them.
