We describe a deep multi-colour NIR survey (TCS-CAIN) that has been recently completed at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Spain). The survey is of selected areas distributed along the Galactic plane and it goes deeper than 2MASS or DENIS. Its aim was to explore the large-scale structure of the Milky Way and the Galactic components, in particular the Galactic bar. This survey has about 10 million point-source detections in J, H, and Ks filters with a photometric accuracy of about 0.1mag in the three bands and a positional accuracy of about 0.2" (based on the 2MASS catalogue as the astrometric reference).