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| Barun Roy: A pan-Asian illusion | | ASIA FILE |
| Barun Roy / New Delhi Dec 04, 2008, 00:06 IST |
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Fifty years on, the Asian Highway that ESCAP is celebrating remains more of an idea than a reality.
Depending on how you see it, a glass may be half full or half empty. Both views are real. But when the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) says it’s going to celebrate the 50th birthday of the Asian Highway next year, it’s nothing but an illusion.
Several questions arise. Is there any such thing as the Asian Highway? Does it actually exist except in ESCAP’s own documents? Has anyone actually travelled the length of this supposed highway that’s meant to bring Asia and Europe closer together?
What ESCAP is going to celebrate is the 50th anniversary of only a concept. Asian Highway still remains, basically, a concept, though, 50 years on, it has become more confusing than the half-full-half-empty glass. On ESCAP’s Web site, the highway appears as a huge tangle of solid and broken red lines covering practically the entire face of Asia. But if you’re looking for a particular route that can be rightfully called an Asian Highway direct and proper, linking specific points of origin and destination, you won’t find any.
Of course, theoretically speaking, one can get in a car in Singapore or Ho Chi Minh City or Kolkata, follow the tangle of roads shown on the ESCAP map, and eventually, if one has the patience and the time to survive the odds at national frontiers, reach Moscow or Paris or London. But that won’t be the same thing as driving on a special Asian Highway for a special Asian Highway experience, cutting through borders, bureaucracies, and hassles. What ESCAP is offering is a veritable Gandhamadan of routes and choices. Take your pick. Find your way. Fine, but don’t call it a seamless pan-Asian corridor representing a common Asian identity.
Perhaps this fact is pricking ESCAP’s conscience and it wants a way to cover up its failure. That appears to be the reason why it plans to organise, jointly with the International Road Transport Union, a truck caravan along the northern segment of the so-called Asian Highway as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations. The caravan, meant to demonstrate regional connectivity, is to start in Tokyo, cross the sea to the Korean peninsula, then traverse through China and Central Asia before reaching Istanbul.
But what will that prove? Nobody denies that it’s possible for such a caravan to make the overland journey from Tokyo to Istanbul. But such a journey would have been possible even without ESCAP being there. The roads that would constitute the caravan’s route have come to be built in response to the concerned countries’ sheer needs of economic growth, trade, and commerce. ESCAP has had no particular guiding role in their development. No common norms of passage have yet been laid on the ground. The caravan will be nothing better than a forced display of premature connectivity.
One wonders why ESCAP is in the picture at all. If anything, its Asian Highway record is dismal. The claimed growth of the highway network from 65,000 km earlier to 141,000 km at present only reveals its amorphous nature. Proposals are still coming in for course correction. The inter-governmental agreement on the network came into force only in July 2005, signed by 28 of the 32 involved countries but ratified by only 21. Only 13 countries meet the minimum standards in all sections of their highways. The ESCAP database on the Asian Highway hasn’t progressed beyond 2006, though ESCAP isn’t solely to blame. It hasn’t been easy to collect data from some countries. Some have never submitted crucial information, such as traffic volumes. Some have never provided updates.
Meanwhile, despite ESCAP, new trans-Asian highways are being built at a brisk pace, spurred by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in some cases and countries like China in others. A $6.7 billion, 2,715-km highway, for which ADB is extending a $700 million loan, will cut through Kazakhstan, between its eastern flank with China and its western border with the Russian Federation, establishing a new Silk Road between Asia and Europe. With the opening of an upgraded Route 3 in Laos last April, a year-round highway link now exists between Kunming, capital of China’s Yunnan province, or, by extension, between Beijing and Singapore. A 1,500-km east-west economic corridor linking Vietnam and Myanmar across six countries of the Mekong sub-region is almost ready and could be extended, if India and Pakistan play ball, all the way to Peshawar.
Trans-boundary linkages, actively promoted by ADB, have brought about major economic changes in the Mekong region while a growing network of new international highways keep breaking down the barriers of isolation between Asia and Europe and between one Asian nation and another. In this emerging scenario, when other, more powerful, forces of change are at work, who needs an irrelevance like ESCAP?
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