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IndiaslonghighwaytoMyanmarstartstotakeshape|Worldnews|TheGuardian

Indias long highway to Myanmar starts to take

shape
Despite obstacles and local concerns, Narendra Modis ambitious $1.3bn plan to link Indias remote
northeastern states to the Bay of Bengal is advancing
Julien Bouissou
Sunday 27 September 2015 10.00BST

ill he ever nish this nightmarish road? In an oce, cluttered with maps, surveys and
land proles, Lalrinngheta, 50, often wonders. A soft-spoken engineer, he has lost count
of the sleepless nights he has had since he started work on the job of his career, a road
connecting India to south-east Asia via Myanmar, at an estimated cost of $115m. The stakes
are huge, he says. He receives frequent calls on his mobile from senior ocials or highranking military in Delhi asking when the road will open. The authorities are growing
impatient. So, regardless of the mudslides and malaria, Lalrinngheta must nish the job by
2017.
In his large insect-infested oce, he has had a safe set into the wall, to keeps the workers
wages, paperwork for subcontractors, and his most faithful friends in the battle against the
jungle: his maps. The construction-project headquarters are perched on top of a hill in the
middle of nowhere, where the emerald-green vegetation stretches as far as the eye can see in
all directions.
Lawngtlai is a dead-end town on the edge of Mizoram state (population 1.1 million), itself at
the extremity of Indias north-east region. For centuries Mizoram has survived in impoverished
isolation. Almost encircled by the Burmese border on one side and Bangladesh on the other, it
depends on federal government subsidies. However, the road is expected to change all that.
On leaving Lawngtlai, the highway will slice through the jungle for 90km before reaching the
Burmese border. Some 130km further on it will reach either Kaletwa or Paletwa. There,
passengers and containers will transfer to ships, travelling 160km down river Kaladan to
Sittwe, with strategic access to the Bay of Bengal. The port is being developed with Indian
funding. In one fell swoop the isolated north-east will be connected to prosperous south-east
Asia, once the whole project, costing an estimated $1.3bn, is complete. Indian Prime minister
Narendra Modi then hopes to connect Gujarat, in western India, to Mizoram, nally delivering
on the Look East policy originally framed in the 1990s.
It is 6am and Lalrinngheta is preparing for a site inspection. At the gate to the new road,
guarded by a security man, he stops to admire his work, striking a pose in his cowboy hat. An
asphalt highway is still a remote dream. At the moment the road is a swathe of ochre earth
cutting through the hillside. To achieve even this much, the engineer has had to ght all the
obstacles the jungle has put in his way: water shortages, malaria, typhoid, delays in obtaining
building permits and occasional hostility from locals.
Every metre has come at a high cost. Around 30 workers have lost their lives due to malaria or
accidents. The workers have lost count of the number of times they have had to start again
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IndiaslonghighwaytoMyanmarstartstotakeshape|Worldnews|TheGuardian

after a mudslide engulfed the road. Lalrinngheta knows, having noted all of them, 127 in the
past year alone. The soil is very loose here, he explains. We constantly have to shore up the
causeway and the banks on either side. We could make broader cuttings, with a gentler slope,
but we have to comply with the standards set by Delhi and the budget. So we just have to get
on with it. After ve years on the project he has started ne-tuning his magnum opus, shaving
a few degrees o bends, digging tunnels to drain monsoon run-o, which is particularly severe
here.
Despite it all, he carries on. Building National Highway-502A is like a game of chess. To
overcome an obstacle, strategic retreat may sometimes be best. In the early days, the workers
laboured under police supervision to protect them from attacks by local tribes, angry at the
lack of compensation for their loss of land. But how could the government buy up common
land? Local farmers practise jhum, a form of slash and burn, cultivating a patch of land then
moving on.
This system of collective ownership caused confusion, so the autonomous district council,
controlled by tribal communities, started issuing property deeds. Unfortunately, there were so
many that they added up to more than the total area of Mizoram. The local anti-corruption
bureau has opened an inquiry. In the meantime opposition has slackened and work on the
highway can continue. In some cases, however, such as when the cemetery was threatened by
a mudslide, the government moved graves and paid each aected family about$1,500 in
compensation.
On and on, regardless of the cost, even without the requisite permits. How could a bureaucrat
at a desk in Delhi possibly understand that delays with paperwork can waste precious time
before the monsoon season starts and cause delays of weeks? Machines grind to a halt and
workers still have to be paid because they have nowhere else to go. One delay leads to another.
It takes four days to replace a faulty part, own in from Singapore, for an earth-mover. Its the
same with cement, lorry loads of it being shipped in from Meghalaya state, or fuel from Assam,
both of which border on Mizoram. Almost the only thing the engineers have found on the spot
is rock. Trucks fetch stones from the banks of a river, tipping them into huge crushers.
When Lalrinnghetas deputy, Lalremruata, goes home he sometimes falls prey to doubts their
project. He remembers catching crabs in the river as a child, walking for several days through
the jungle to reach the next village. Isnt the road going to wreck this green haven? Will it
really benet Mizoram and its people? he asks. What he does know, though, is that with the
new highway, rare tree species and wildlife will be under threat, because it will be easier to
harvest them.
He tries to shrug o his doubts by thoughts that once the construction job is nished he might
open a shop on the border. Im very keen on anything electrical. Down there, on the border
people will always be needing equipment, buying generators, switches and lightbulbs,
Lalremruata explains. He has already promised his wife that when the road is open he will take
her and the children to Myanmar, to show them the sea. The highway will halve the distance to
Kolkata, down to 930km, bringing the heart of India closer to the north-east.
The highway is still a topic of debate for the Mizo, the largest tribe in the region, which gave its
name to Mizoram and fought for independence until 1986. Were in danger of being
assimilated by foreigners, or losing our language and culture if we open up too much to the
outside world, says Lalmuanpuia Punte, a militant who still advocates independence. We
can accept a road, because newcomers will only come in dribs and drabs and it will benet
development, but never a railway.
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IndiaslonghighwaytoMyanmarstartstotakeshape|Worldnews|TheGuardian

At the other end of NH-502A the Bru, or Reang, people have already started to adjust. Eighty or
so families have moved their bamboo huts down the hill to rebuild them at the side of the
currently unnished road. Wild pigs slumber between the stilts supporting the huts. At
nightfall women, decked out with bracelets and nose rings, bring baskets of wild fruit back
from the woods. The road enables us to sell what we gather to shoppers at Lawngtlai, without
bothering with middlemen, one says with a big smile. Her neighbour shrugs. How are we to
set up shop? We have no money to invest, less still to buy a scooter and drive down the road,
he says. Their outlook is all the more uncertain because they do not own the land they have
occupied. Sitting on straw mats we talked to several villagers about how they pictured a road
full of lorries.
A schoolteacher, who recently moved into a model village, a scheme hatched by politicians
located just a step away from Myanmar, is sceptical. They promise us jobs, but we speak
neither Hindi nor Bengali and certainly not English. How could we get work? he asks. The
people living here, at the end of the road, are not interested in Asia or the Indian Ocean, just
what will change in their daily lives. Road builders have warned them that once the highway is
open they will need to show their papers and go through customs when visiting Myanmar to
visit relatives.
For the villagers, NH-502A will bring a new frontier.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
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