As India places the Mekong sub-region among its priorities under the country’s ‘Act East’ policy, the ongoing India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway project––currently the only land connectivity project between India and the Mekong countries and the wider Southeast Asian region––could prove to be a game changer. It is imperative to explore ways to ensure early completion of this strategic communication link. This paper focuses on the project’s procedural, financial and bureaucratic aspects and provides recommendations to ensure its effective and timely implementation.
Introduction
The Indian government is giving a renewed push to road connectivity with Southeast Asia. On 13 November 2016, the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway (IMT Highway) Friendship Car Rally was flagged off in Delhi by Mansukh Lal Mandaviya, Indian Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways, Shipping and Chemicals and Fertilizers. According to the government, the objective of the rally was to sensitise stakeholders to the potential benefits of a motor vehicles agreement (MVA) between the three countries.[i] Earlier, on 8 September 2016 at the 14th India-ASEAN Summit held in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had stressed the need for further strengthening Delhi’s ties with the regional bloc ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Emphasising the significance of overall connectivity, and physical connectivity in particular, as the first step to enhancing people-to-people contacts, Modi proposed the setting up of a Joint Task Force on connectivity to work on extending the IMT highway even further to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.[ii] Just a month before that, during the visit of President Htin Kyaw of Myanmar to India in August 2016, two MoUs were signed for the construction and upgrade of bridges and approach roads in the Tamu-Kyigone-Kalewa section and the Kalewa-Yargyi section of the IMT highway in Myanmar.[iii]
Delhi’s renewed diplomatic focus on the Mekong sub-region comes at a time when the region is seeing increased geopolitical competition among major powers, including China, the US, India and Japan, as their interests overlap and intersect in this sub-region.[iv] As Delhi gives a further diplomatic push to strengthening ties with the CLMV countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam) and Thailand under the Modi government’s ‘Act East’ policy, the IMT highway project could be a game changer for India-Mekong ties and the wider Southeast Asia. As India and ASEAN take the proposed joint task force forward, the need to complete the original stretch of the project from India to Thailand via Myanmar has become even more urgent. This paper examines the significance and current status of the IMT highway, focusing on its procedural, financial and bureaucratic aspects. It provides specific recommendations to ensure effective and timely implementation of the project––currently the only land connectivity project underway between India and the Mekong countries and to the wider Southeast Asia region.
Strategic Salience of the Mekong sub-region
The Mekong sub-region, or what the Indian government calls the CLMV countries, forms a major part of mainland Southeast Asia and connects the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, by land. For India, the strategic salience of the sub-region lies in the fact that it shares long land and maritime boundaries with one of the CLMV countries, Myanmar, in the Bay of Bengal, and its important strategic partner Vietnam has maritime territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea—through which about 50 percent of India’s trade passes. The direct impact of China’s rise has been playing out in the CLMV countries in recent years, with China emerging as either the largest, or a major, trading and investment partner of all the CLMV countries. As China’s wealth spreads to its immediate peripheries, poorer and smaller nations in the Mekong sub-region are being drawn towards the Chinese economy. On the strategic front, Beijing has been taking advantage of the geostrategic location of the CLMV countries to reach the Indian Ocean and to tie their economies with its bigger and stronger economy by building rail and road networks and laying energy pipelines.
China also plans to connect its southwest Yunnan provincial capital of Kunming with the Southeast Asian nations with new high- and medium-speed rail services. In November 2016, Laos signed a railway deal to connect its capital, Vientiane with Kunming.[v] The line is expected to be completed by 2020 with work on the Chinese side already underway since last December. Another rail line will run from Kunming to Vietnam and Cambodia.[vi] Earlier, China built oil and gas pipelines running from the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan through Myanmar[vii]and also plans to build rail tracks and roads along the pipelines.[viii] Along with these rail lines or what China calls the “pan-Asian Railway Network”, these corridors will be part of the China-proposed One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative and will form the “Indochina Peninsula Corridor”, one of the six trans-regional economic corridors of the OBOR. Importantly, all the CLMV countries have given official assent to the initiative, giving it varying degrees of support. Laos and Cambodia have been “most supportive” of the OBOR.[ix] During her visit to China in July 2016, Myanmar’s state counsellor and foreign minister Aung San Suu Kyi “welcomed” the OBOR initiative.[x]
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