Page 2 of
2 India's rail-building
challenge By Sudha Ramachandran
attacks in the neighboring state of Assam
and there is concern in Delhi that it will be the
same in Manipur as well.
"If it has taken
so many years for India to begin railway-line
construction in Manipur, which is within its
borders, imagine the time it is going to take to
construct a cross-border railroad," said a
skeptical businessman in Imphal, Manipur's
capital. "It will be a long, long time before we
get to see freight trains steaming
crossing the border into
Mynamar."
Drawing on his experience with
trade through the India-Myanmar Friendship Road
that runs through Moreh - the road has been
operational for about five years - he said that as
a result of poor infrastructure and bureaucratic
apathy on both sides of the border, benefits from
the road link had fallen far short of
expectations. "There is little reason to believe
that things will be different with the rail link,"
he said.
The businessman pointed out that
Chinese and Thai goods dominate the Myanmar market
and, contrary to all the media hype over
India-Myanmar trade, the trade through Moreh has
dropped over the past few years. "We have entered
the scene rather late," he said.
One has
only to look across the border to the pace at
which China's rail-building activity has steamed
ahead over the past decade compared with India's
lethargic approach in the same period to
understand how India persists with tripping itself
up. While China witnessed a 24% growth in new
railway tracks since 1992, India's expanded by a
mere 1% in the same period.
Last year,
with the Golmud-Lhasa train that crosses some of
the highest mountain ranges in the world, China
signaled that hostile weather and treacherous
terrain were not hurdles in the way of its
rail-building ambitions. Now Beijing is steaming
ahead with rail lines in its Yunnan province,
which borders Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. It has
started work in Yunnan to ensure that trains will
soon run from the provincial capital Kunming to
Singapore via Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam,
Cambodia and Malaysia and is plowing in about $6.3
billion in the next couple of years to make this
happen.
Simultaneously, China is moving
swiftly to get a road network in place. Together
with Laos and Thailand, it is building a 1,818km
international highway that starts from Kunming and
ends at Bangkok.
Sixty percent of the
construction on this highway's Chinese section
that runs from Kunming up to Mohan on the border
is done, and the remainder of this section is to
be completed by late this year. Two other highways
running from Kunming to Hanoi in Vietnam and
Yangon in Myanmar will be completed by late 2007
and will be upgraded to freeways by 2010.
Indian Railway officials point out that
India is not lagging behind. The 2006 railway
budget set aside $5 billion to build 10,000km of
dedicated freight lines within the country by
2010. Freight corridors will link New Delhi with
Mumbai and other ports in the west, and with
Kolkata in the east. Freight lines linking
industrial hubs and ports near these cities are
also planned.
Also on the drawing board
are plans to set up rail links with Bhutan, which
does not have a railway network yet. Feasibility
studies are being done to examine the prospects of
links between Hasimara, West Bengal, to
Phuentsholing; Kokrajhar, Assam, to Gelephu;
Pathsala, Assam, to Nanglam; Rangiya, Assam, to
Samdrupjongkhar; and Banarhat, West Bengal, to
Samtse. And there are dreams too of a rail
corridor to the west running through Pakistan to
Iran and Central Asia.
India's ambition of
reaching out to the neighborhood and beyond
through railways is certainly grand. What is still
lacking, though, is the steam to make it happen
quickly.
Sudha Ramachandran is
an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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