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External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday that the India-Myanmar-Thailand triple highway was a “very difficult project” due to the situation in Myanmar and it was the government’s priority to find ways to resume it.
Jaishankar is here to participate in the 12th Mekong Ganga Cooperation (MGC) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and to attend the BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers Retreat.
Addressing the Indian community upon his arrival here, Jaishankar spoke of the interdependence between Thailand and India.
“The real challenge that we have today and that we are working on, is how do we build a road connection between Thailand… We have this project from northeastern India, if we build a road through Myanmar, and this road connects to what Thailand is,” Jaishankar said.
With good road connectivity, he said, the movement of goods and the movement of people will undergo tremendous change.
But it was a very difficult project. It was a very difficult project mainly because of the situation in Myanmar. And one of our priorities today is finding ways of how to resume this project, how to open it up, how to implement it because large parts of the project have already been built.”
India, Thailand and Myanmar are working on a highway of about 1,400 km that will connect the country to Southeast Asia by land and boost trade, health, education and tourism ties between the three countries.
About 70 percent of the construction work on the ambitious three-way road between India, Myanmar and Thailand has been completed.
The highway will connect Moreh in Manipur, India, with Mae Sot, Thailand, via Myanmar.
The strategic highway project has been postponed. Earlier, the government had aimed to make the highway operational by December 2019.
On India’s relations with Thailand, Jaishankar said the relationship with Thailand dates back to history.
This is a historical and cultural relationship for centuries. It is a relationship that began to blossom again after independence. It gained more momentum in the 1990s. But the last 10 years have been a very, very different period for this relationship.”
He also spoke during his speech about economic growth in India.
“If you look at the major economies in the world today, there are not many major economies that are growing above 5 percent. We hope today, despite all the problems in the world, that we are close to 7 percent growth.”
He also praised the contribution made by the Indian community in Thailand during the Covid pandemic.
It also highlighted the changes taking place in India.
Speaking about digitalization in India, he said from Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg from Satya Nadella to Elon Musk, everyone today is looking at digital India and looking at how today’s digital talent and digital infrastructure apply to governance.
“This is what you really learn,” said Jaishankar, “when we say with confidence that we have it in the next 25 years to become a developed country.”
Speaking about the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said, “We used to be considered as a very difficult country in terms of climate change. Today, we are seen as one of the leaders in climate change.” He said that the biggest proposals on climate change in the past 10 years have come by Prime Minister Modi.
Speaking about the Ukrainian-Russian war, he said: “There is a shortage of grain in the world, and it is aggravated by the fact that grain does not come out of Ukraine and Russia.”
Jaishankar said that Prime Minister Modi is pushing the idea of cultivating millet that requires less water and there are many new sources of millet.
“I’m not minimizing the challenges, there will be problems. You can’t be the most populous country in the world and not have problems. You can’t be a developing country and not have challenges but the issue today is how far with what conviction with what determination with what vision And lead, we’re dealing with some of this, he said.
(This story was not edited by the News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)
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