The 1,600-km Indo-Myanmar border is one of the world’s more notional frontiers. It was delineated for the Raj’s convenience in the 1930s. It looks as though the district commissioners of erstwhile Burma and Assam sat down one weekend over margaritas after a couple of chukkas and drew a line on the basis of “Bloggs old chap, take the Western ridges for India and Dobbs, you can have the Eastern ridges for Burma”.
In defence of the cartographers, the region doesn’t lend itself to mapping. It consists of heavily forested hills with a few roads through the less impassable bits. The road-connectivity is no better than in the 1940s when the 14th Army and the Japanese fought bitterly over the main land routes.
Post-Partition, maintaining connectivity to the North-East (NE) got more difficult for India. The Chittagong port and the road-rail-steamer links through what is now Bangladesh were no longer available. The only land route was the Siliguri Chicken’s Neck. In 1962, the Chinese could have cut that and grabbed the entire region at will.
It’s hugely expensive to construct roads and rail tracks in the NE hills. Efforts are only now being made to put Imphal, Kohima, Aizawl and Itanagar on the railway map. Agartala was connected by rail as recently as 2008.
A new project went into play in May. The Rs 530 crore Kaladan Multi-Modal Transport (KMMT) project is funded by the Indian government. But it is almost entirely located in Burma. Essar Projects will refurbish the Burmese port of Sittwe some 300 nautical miles (540 km) — about 20 hours journey — from Haldia.
Sittwe sits on the Bay of Bengal, at the mouth of the Kaladan river, which is navigable upstream for 225 km till the river port of Kaletwa, where Essar will build another terminal. Essar will also dredge the Kaladan to keep the Sittwe-Kaletwa stretch clear for barge services. From Kaletwa, a 140-km road will be constructed to reach Moreh on the Manipur border. Mizoram will also be connected via a 65-km road.
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A container from Kolkata to Imphal via the KMMT will go via a convoluted, cross-border route. First, 550 km on an ocean-going vessel, followed by 225 km on a river barge, and then by truck traversing 140 km of Burmese highways and finally, 100 km from Moreh to Imphal.
By road, Imphal-Kolkata involves driving about 1,600 km and Aizawl-Kolkata is about the same. The KMMT is both cheaper and quicker. It also considerably improves the NE’s links with Asean. Once it’s up in 2012, the KMMT should trigger massive expansion of local trade.
The strategic thinkers are worrying about the Indian Navy’s ability to guard Sittwe. The environmentalists wonder what dredging may do to the fishing-based economy of the Kaladan. But at least one cause of the NE’s endemic insurgency is lack of employment. The trade boost should lead to some improvement on that front.
The KMMT is part of a process of forging a deeper, more mutually-dependent relationship between the government of India and the rulers of Myanmar. There are also ambitious plans of building an Indo-Myanmar highway to Thailand and extending rail links from Imphal to Burma.
On the energy front, NHPC intends to build a 460-Mw hydel project on the Kaladan, spanning South Mizoram and Myanmar. Talks about a gas pipeline out of Myanmar into West Bengal also continue though it’s difficult to bypass Bangladesh.
If push comes to shove, India would back the current regime to protect the new assets. The government of Myanmar isn’t exactly stable. Nor can it be categorised as democratic or benevolent. The winner of the last election in that country has spent the last 20 years under house arrest. One understands the logic of realpolitik but it sticks in the craw to see this apparently inevitable alignment of interests.