I wonder how much it would have cost to do this with mining/tunnelling/etc. modern equipment. And whether it would have been cheaper to pay him $10/hr for 22 years of work, or whether the 'modern' way would have cost more.
A "normal" pay would probably have been closer to half a dollar to a dollar per day (if even that), 300 days a year or so. So we're talking $3000~$6000 total, tops.
This is basically a big straight trench, so you could probably have done it in a few days or weeks with an excavator. An excavator rental costs between 800 and 3000 a week depending on the excavator class (size and engine power, minis in the 15-40hp range will be at the lower end, the stuff you can see on construction sites will usually be in the 150hp range and closer to the higher third, I'm excluding the ridiculous stuff such as the CAT 6090 or the baggers which make sense in neither scale nor cost for this comparison)
So the purely monetary cost would probably be about the same if you had an excavator close-by which you could rent (and you were a skilled operator).
edit: actually for that kind of works you'd probably use a backhoe loader rather than a straight excavator, but the costs should be in the same range
edit 2: but to answer the question as asked, it would be way cheaper to use even a full-blown set of heavy earth-movers (and crew) than to pay the guy $10/h, 10h/day, 300 days/year for 22 years (which would cost $660k)
Why does he get 65 days off a year? This is not North America, Europe or industrialized Asia. Most of day labourers I've spoken to in Asia consider themselves lucky if they get two or three days off a month. At that low level, for most of us, they lose a precious few days of work which is often vital for them to have enough money to eat that day.
Because why not (and I know india has quite a lot of religious celebrations which may or may not have holidays attached).
Because it's easier to multiply by 300 than by any 340
http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/for-days-of-holiday-and...
http://www.rediff.com/money/slide-show/slide-show-1-indians-...
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/work.life.balance/chart...
Everything I can find seems to indicate that the average US worker does not have a lot of leisure time in comparison to most countries, and also that average working hours does not seem to have a particularly strong correlation with the average wealth of the citizens.
Indians probably do work longer hours on average, but I don't think the gap is that large from what I can tell, though the statistics vary wildly. Forbes for instance has figures that seem to be much lower than other estimates and they claim an average of 25 hours a week for people from the US.
http://www.ilo.org/jobspact/WCMS_071326/lang--en/index.htm
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/life-lin...
http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/20/steven-landsburg-labor_cx_s...
Judging from the photos, The mountain looks like one big rock. You would surely need a hydraulic breaker on your backhoe, and the maintenance that would go with it for so much work. Also, it looks like it would be hard to get a backhoe on top of that steep mountain.
I would have thought for something like this, drilling deep holes and shoving in some TNT would be the way to go in order to reduce the solid rock to rubble.
Not to mention the lives that could have been saved if the road was built faster with heavy machinery. I wonder how many people died waiting for that road to be built.
The glass is half full, too, ya know.
He probably saved a lot of lives after it was built, even one life would have been worth his efforts. I was just talking about opportunity costs and if some had helped him, less people would have died/suffered while the road was being built. If heavy machinery was involved, less people would've died waiting or suffered less traveling the long way to medical care.
40 hours/week * 50 week/year * 20 years * 10 $/hour= = 400000$