India developing Myanmar port

Chennai: The Union Government has decided to develop the Sittwe port for Myanmar. In return for its $120 million (Rs 480 crore) expenditure on the project — which will be a gift to Myanmar — India would get rights to use the port. This is significant as access to the port will provide a gateway for the North-Eastern States to the rest of the world.

Disclosing this to Business Line, the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Mr Jairam Ramesh, termed it as “the most significant initiative the Indian government has taken in South-East Asia.”

“India proposes to build the port, make the Kaladan river navigable up to the Mizoram border, and then provide highway connectivity within Mizoram,” he said.

A formal agreement to develop Sittwe will be signed when a high-level Myanmarese delegation visits India in April.

This project has been on the anvil for almost six years now, but is now it is closer to fruition because the paradigm of the project has been shifted from ‘build, operate, transfer’ to ‘build, transfer, use’.

Earlier, Myanmar was not comfortable with the BOT proposal because it did not want an India-owned port within its own territory.

Now, India would build the port and hand it over to Myanmar. “Then we will use it,” he said.

As of now, the only way goods from the North-East could reach India is through the “chicken-neck” to the North of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh does not allow Indian goods to transit the country.

Cut off from the rest of the country by Bangladesh, the North-East remains largely under-developed.

But the Sittwe project will provide an alternative route the North-East to the rest of the world. For example, rubber from Tripura could reach southern India across the Bay of Bengal, via Sittwe.