Road to Bangkok still a long way

What can easily be described as one of Asia’s most ambitious road projects just got even more ambitious. At the BIMST-EC Summit in Bang...

What can easily be described as one of Asia’s most ambitious road projects just got even more ambitious. At the BIMST-EC Summit in Bangkok, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that the trilateral India-Myanmar-Thailand highway project would have an optical fibre telecomunication link running alongside. India is expected to announce a major financial package for the trilateral telecommunication link.

The BIMST-EC (henceforth Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi Sectoral and Economic Cooperation) was a perfect setting to review progress on paving of the 1,360-kilometer trilateral dream of connectivity announced in Yangon in April 2002. The road will connect Moreh in Manipur to Mae Sot town in Northern Thailand, through Bagan in Central Myanmar. For India, it will provide a land corridor connecting its North-East with Thailand and Myanmar.

Even as the highway project is referred to as the showpiece infrastructure project of the grouping of the Bay of Bengal countries, the pace of work on ground is painfully slow.

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According to the Yangon schedule, the highway should have been completed in April 2004. Officials accompanying the PM admitted that Mynamar’s insistence of having a completely new road laid out in its territory — which India and Thailand will mostly be funding — has been a principal cause for delay.

India’s Ambassador in Bangkok, Leela K. Ponappa told The Indian Express in Bangkok that they were now waiting for the dates of a trilateral review meeting to be held in Myanmar in a few weeks’ time. ‘‘The project symbolises what economic cooperation among BIMST-EC countries actually means. Once fully constructed, there will be significant improvement in tourist and pilgrim traffic,’’ she said.

In Bangkok, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath was also at hand to talk about how the trilateral road typified the nature of infrastructural cooperation that was possible between BIMST-EC countries.

‘‘Everyone is anxious about this project because it will symbolise regional cooperation in the infrastructure sector. Once, the technical meeting is held in Myanmar, we will be in a better position to monitor progress.’’

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More

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