“India Is About To Listen To Black Holes. Here’s Why That Matters.”, Swarajya Magzine, February 24, 2026
“In the dry scrubland of Hingoli district, in eastern Maharashtra, something extraordinary is about to happen. On February 24, Larsen & Toubro, India’s largest engineering conglomerate, announced it had secured a contract from the Department of Atomic Energy to build LIGO-India — a ₹2,600 crore observatory designed to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.
The contract, classified by L&T as “significant” (its internal designation for orders between ₹1,000 crore and ₹2,500 crore), covers the full engineering, procurement, and construction of what will become one of the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built on Indian soil.
Two L&T divisions — Heavy Civil Infrastructure and Heavy Engineering — will jointly build vibration-proof precision buildings, then manufacture and install the observatory’s defining feature: an 8-kilometre L-shaped steel tube maintained at a vacuum deeper than interplanetary space. The completion deadline is 48 months. If all goes to plan, by the end of this decade, a stretch of Maharashtra farmland will be listening to black holes colliding a billion light-years away…….”
Read full article at swarajyamag.com
