India’s long highway to Myanmar starts to take shape

[Jonathan Fairfield]

India’s long highway to Myanmar starts to take shape

Will he ever finish this nightmarish road? In an office, cluttered with maps, surveys and land profiles, 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 officials or high-ranking military in Delhi asking when the road will open. The authorities are growing impatient. So, regardless of the mudslides and malaria, Lalrinngheta must finish the job by 2017.

In his large insect-infested office, 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 India’s 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.

Full story: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/27/india-myanmar-road-mizoram-tribal-areas-modi

[Tai777]

Hmmm..This could be very bad