Opinion Stay on track

The government’s decision to fast track the construction of four high-priority strategic railway corridors begins a project of utmost importance to national security. These routes are among the 14 strategically crucial lines identified by the armed forces for transporting supplies and troops, should the contingency arise. The Indian Railways, tasked with carrying out the detailed engineering survey, has protested its inability to finance the lines and their irrelevance to its operational needs. However, critical border infrastructure cannot be prioritised according to commercial viability. It should also be noted that three of these four routes are in the landlocked and poorly connected Northeast, where the remotest state, Arunachal Pradesh, shares a 1,000 km border with China that Beijing can reach faster than Delhi, thanks to the transit infrastructure China has built on its side of the border.

While such infrastructure should not ideally be categorised as either civilian or military, its sectoral components — railways, roadways and air connectivity — cannot be seen in isolation from one another. Nowhere is this truer than in the Northeast. For example, the recent extension of rail connectivity to Itanagar cannot be delinked from the upgrade of the Imphal and Agartala airports or the construction of the greenfield airport near Gangtok, or from the need to connect the Northeast to the Chittagong and Sittwe ports. Manipur lies at the end of NH 39 and NH 53, and the protracted blockades of 2010-11 had completely cut the state off. The people of Arunachal Pradesh languish on isolated terrain, ill-served by disaster-prone helicopters. Strategic, economic and civilian utility can, therefore, be closely interlinked. The same holds for the Bilaspur-Leh rail link in Himachal Pradesh and J&K. The government should continue to prioritise permanent transport infrastructure along India’s borders, irrespective of commercial concerns.

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Surveying and constructing these lines will throw up not only geological challenges but also the more fundamental challenge of geography that characterises these areas. Geopolitically, this project ties in with the NDA’s first steps in overhauling India’s China policy under the UPA, which had denied India’s economy the full benefits of an economic partnership with China while overlooking the genuine security challenges posed by China along India’s border.