Trade route to china

 

 

“The Chinese don’t speak, they act,” a Khasi delegate from Meghalaya remarked as Assam Minister for Power and Industries, Pradyut Bordoloi, while speaking at a recent conference in Guwahati on India’s Look East Policy, presented a film clip on the Second World War Stillwell Road that stretches 1,700 km between Ledo in Assam, Myanmar and Kunming in China. Even as India and Myanmar speak of reopening the road—“We are exploring the possibilities,” said External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee—the Chinese have already turned their part of the road into a smooth highway and shaved a few 100 kilometres off it on their side of the border. The comment was well deserved.

At stake for the Northeast would be a share, however small, of the $20 billion trade between India and China, a figure that, as per FICCI, could rise five-fold over the next six years. Currently, things are being considered from the Look East Policy point of view coupled with the Centre’s Northeast Industrial and Investment Policy, which includes broad subsidies for investment in the seven states in the region, and a number of cross-border development projects with China, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Of significance among these would be the new bus and train services between India and Bangladesh, an optical fibre project by BSNL to connect the Northeast with South-east Asia and an optical fibre project being executed by Telecommunications Consulting of India Ltd to connect the region to Myanmar and Nepal.

The Stilwell Road issue, quite surprisingly, did not merit beyond a one line mention in Mukherjee’s speech. The fear, believes Bordoloi, was that the opening of the road could mean a flood of arms, drugs and HIV, “as if isn’t happening now”. “The idea would be to change our mindsets and think of our frontiers as gateways, not just borders,” he said. Changing mindsets, of course, often takes longer than expected.