By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Feb 17:
One cannot live a life without leading some network or the other in place. An individual may seem to be confined himself in a corner and leading a life as if the rest of the world does not exist. But it could be that he is digesting the knowledge and ideas contained in the Puyas and the Upanishads. It could as well be that he is meditation and networking with a higher order – Gautam Budha gave us his teachings as by-products of his networking with the higher order. In the case of physical or person to person networking, different from this mental or virtual in modern ways, one may leap-frog and get into a networking relationship with others away from his immediate neighbours. One college-mates could naturally be from places far from one’s own location. These are the ways an individual can have networking.
But when it comes to a country (nation/state), the scenario is very different. The networking of a nation with another nation has to be in real terms and not in the meditational way. Further, leap-frogging (leaving the neighbouring nations aside) and becoming friends with countries away from the neighbouring ones would not be sustainable in the long-term for reasons of economy, polity and culture; one may leap-frog a drain, but a country cannot leap-frog another neighbouring country.
The Asian Highway 2(AH2) is a road in the Asian Highway Network running 13,107 kilometres from Denpasar in Indonesia to Khosravi in Iran passing through Myanmar and India’s North-East. Before I comment on the present scenario relating to AH2, let us recall on the significance of highways. David Hilling writes in Transport And Developing Countries (1996):
“There can be few if any countries in which road transport is not now the dominant mode by which people and goods are moved and there is a universality about road transport which does not apply to any other mode. In contrast with railways, road transport is characterised by a very wide range of technologies and levels of sophistication. At one end of the spectrum there is the movement of people, or goods carried by people, on foot over some kind of route, possibly of an unimproved kind. Even in the most advanced economies over the shortest distances there is really no alternative to walking. For some this may be no further than to their car in the garage, the local shop or from the railway station to the office. However, for many, indeed possibly the majority, of people in Developing Countries there may be no alternative to walking, whatever the distance involved and irrespective of the fact that goods may have to be carried. At the other end of the spectrum is the movement of people and goods in specialised road vehicles possibly along engineered roads of considerable sophistication. In advanced consumer-orientated economies, road haulage has assumed overwhelming importance by virtue of its flexibility, convenience and door-to-door capability, whether for the movement of goods or people, yet these same qualities also make road transport a valuable pioneer mechanical mode in economically less advanced areas. Between the head loading person and the lorry are found a great variety of intermediate technologies—including pack animals, hand carts, animal-drawn carts, bicycles, rickshaws and motor cycles. The ‘roads’ along which these vehicles move may be no more than temporarily cleared paths, these may be given some permanence by the frequent passage of feet or wheels or they may be engineered at varying levels of technology from the graded earth road to the multi-lane express and motorways and the complex, segregated road systems of large urban areas, with pavements and precincts for pedestrians. It is frequently the case that roads and road transport of different levels of technology integrate spatially and functionally into hierarchical systems. Three distinct but closely related elements of road transport change with time. First, there is the development of the network. This may be viewed as a series of steps by which an increasing number of nodes are connected and gradually build up into a spatially integrated system of routes with increasing levels of connectivity. Second, road construction technology has changed with time and third, there is the changing character of the vehicles which use the track. These three elements are inextricably linked, thus, wheeled vehicles necessitated improved surfacing and better alignments. Alignment will be closely related to terrain and will also be influenced by the type of vehicles in use and the road design and construction technology adopted. Thus, improved roads may have to be on a different alignment from the original.”
I have had the opportunity of seeing the AH2 in countries on the Eastern Side of India and most recently on the Western Side of India. Commenting on the relative approaches and interventions in place today, a friend in a neighbouring country commented “India is the only country which does not take interest in AH2.” I cannot add any comment to this. Development is never a single component phenomenon – highways are to supplement each other with the airports inter alia. While coming back from the AH2 trip, I took a flight from the Bagdogra Airport. But most agonisingly the Bagdogra Airport is nothing more than the very crowded train stations we witnessed while travelling for education more than half a century back except that security machines and personnel are there as being an airport; being very crowded, the airlines staff cannot exercise the normal humility and modesty expected of them in an airport.
The roads have already been developed to satisfactory level in the metros in India. But the border provinces in the country are not yet so fortunate in both domestic and international networking. Let us take a deep look at the 2014 Manifesto of the BJP and the promises contained therein. It has been more than ten years, and they can no longer take the excuse that the Party in power before them did not frame a policy for border provinces; border policy goes much beyond boundary fencing.
