Forty-six-year-old Lila Ram Acharya, a resident of a small village in Babai Valley, around one hour's drive from the western Nepali city of Nepalgunj, still remembers how hopeless he was as a household head about three years ago.

Born to a poor family, he was a grade-three dropout without a skill. His wife is illiterate and their two sons are students.

With only slender earnings form his land, in and out of other work, he couldn't earn enough to cover all the household expenses.

The pressure to provide his sons' tuition and to support the family forced Acharya to travel to India where he worked for a few months but earned little.

When one door shuts, another opens. Acharya's fate and that of his family changed after the Bheri Babai Diversion Multipurpose Project, or BBDMP, one of Nepal's national pride projects. was inaugurated in June, 2015. The aim was to enhance agricultural production by providing year-round irrigation and generating reliable electricity.

For this strategic project for this Himalayan nation, the contractor, a Chinese construction company, China Overseas Engineering Group Co. Ltd. has been using tunnel boring machine, or TBM, for the first time in Nepal to dig a 12.2-km tunnel which allows surplus water in the Bheri River to flow into the Babai River.

This unprecedented interbasin water transfer project, is conceptualized to provide year-round irrigation to 51,000 hectares of agricultural land in Banke and Bardiya districts.

"I have been working here as a laborer for two years. The job is good, so is the income. As compared to the past, life is far better now," Acharya told Xinhua at the construction site.

Among the over 2,100 local people recruited for this project of national significance, Acharya is one of the 600 workers working on the site currently. Every evening, he boards a company train, which takes 40 minutes to reach inside the 12.2 km long tunnel, where he is stationed.

He works for 12 hours every day inside the tunnel and earns up to Rs. 35,000 ($350) every month including overtime work. That is nearly three times more than the minimum labor wage fixed by the Nepali government, which stands at Rs. 13,450 per month.

While Acharya is busy with the job, his wife, 36-year-old Laxmi Jaisi, operates a hotel, serving local workers with typical Nepali food rice and curry. With help from his husband, Laxmi arranges two meals a day for this constant flows of customers.

"It is a good income for us to educate our sons," Laxmi told Xinhua while preparing a lunch box at the hotel, adding that life is better than before. The couple, who married about 22 years ago, now can afford the living and educational costs of their two sons in nearby cities.

The Chinese contractor also helped them to construct a new concrete house with four rooms in Chepang village, just across the Babai River. Wisely, they rented out two rooms.

The rental business is a byproduct of this big project, which has infused new life into the village, turning a once almost-deserted nook full of traditional mud houses into a small modern town with concrete buildings, just like Acharya's present one.

Saligram Adhikari, mayor of the Basgadhi municipality of Bardiya district, told Xinhua, "The project is linked to villages where people are mostly poor. They have received employment opportunities with good income."

At a time when most of the people in nearby villages were either unemployed or engaged in small-scale agriculture or had moved to the Gulf and Middle East in search of employment opportunities, the Chinese construction project has provided jobs to over 2,100 locals.

According to the project manager, Hu Tianran, the main part of the project is in the final phase. Acharya, however, doesn't worry about losing his job anymore.

He said confidently that he would find another similar job without difficulty on other projects since now he has the skills that he learned from his Chinese colleagues on the construction site.