It is fine to talk of development. It would be, perhaps, be better to talk of some preconditions – transport and communications, for instance. Those living in “mainland India”, cut off by the Chicken Neck Corridor as it were would have the faintest idea about connectivity in the Northeast, is all about. Some four years back, the Shukla Commission had mentioned, “Few realise that the Indian Air Force even today operates what must be the largest civil air supply mission anywhere in the world apart from meeting strategic requirements In the remote Himalayan outreaches of Arunachal Pradesh.” The state of affairs remains the same even “today”.
The Northeast, for all practical purposes, was severed off with Partition. All modes of road, rail and river transport through what now became East Pakistan came to a grinding halt. What remained was a tiny tract which was physically contiguous with North Bengal (read, the rest of the country). All road and rail traffic now had to pass only through this choke point. Air communication was hardly worth the name then, it is not much writing home about now either. When one talks of communication, what gets preponderance in such discussions is of links between the Northeast and the rest of the country. While that is indeed vital, what ironically gets obfuscated in the bargain is the fact that communication within the landlocked region itself is a developer’s conundrum.
For a river than flows more than 700 km through the hills of Arunachal Pradesh and the pains of Assam, the mighty Brahmaputra only has three bridges. Construction on the fourth one, which remained a bridge of sighs and much heartburn for long, we are told, is all set to begin now. That was what the Prime Minister’s trip to the Northeast a couple of weeks back was all about. The Bogibeel bridge which is to connect Dibrugarh with Lakhimpur had its foundation stone laid way back in 1996. And by moderate estimates, it is going to take another seven years before the first train crosses the Brahmaputra here. The case of the Bogibeel bridge, obviously, is symbolic. It is representative of how development work can take a backseat because of political shortsightedness. It is also illustrative of how political expediency can sometimes indeed benefit the people.
The road-cum-rail bridge at Bogibeel would bring one naturally to the question of the railways. Gauge-conversion is still not a thing of the past – it is still on in main sections. While the Siliguri-Guwahati stretch is choked because of traffic, the blowing up of tracks and bridges on and off by militants has not made things easier. Travelling till Siliguri is fine, but thereafter trains have little other option but to crawl. Trains crawl as much on other tiny distributory sections as well. Railheads into Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh are hardly worth mentioning. The same applies to Meghalaya and Manipur. In the case of Nagaland, the much stops at Dimapur. It is yet to be seen what happens to the Jan Shatabdi Express trains that are to commute between Guwahati and Dimapur.
Rain links, needless to say, hold little hope for the people of the Northeast. What has kept the people moving within the region have been the roads. Almost 15 per cent of the Centre’s road allocation goes to the Northeast with the maintenance work being done by the state PWDs or the Directorate General Border Roads (DGBR), either directly or on an agency basis for the North Eastern Council (NEC) which funds inter-state links. The maintenance budget, which is related to the road length in the region, is barely half of what is required. In other words, the road, the lifelines of the Northeast, take a battering in the face of harsh weather conditions/situations and the heavy traffic that rides over them. The maintenance apart, what is needed is a separate highways policy altogether.
With railways in the shape as it is, and road transport obviously not the quickest possible mode, in exigencies the people have to take recourse to flying. The Northeast, even the Shukla Commission pointed out, had a rich legacy of World War II airstrips which were used through the 1950s to operate non-scheduled air taxi services with Dakotas and similar aircraft. To look at the state of affairs now with that backdrop is disappointing. All Northeast capital towns are still not connected with each other or to Guwahati. Kohima and Itanagar still remain out of bounds for Indian Airlines. Operating in the Northeast is not a profitable option for carriers either.
Much potential even now lies in inland water transport. The Ganga-Barhmaputra-Barak/Meghna system is one of the greatest natural waterways in the world. Partition, the massive earthquake of 1950 and the growth of rail and road communication served a death knell to this preferred mode of commuting. All those who cross the rivers on ferries and big boats are precisely those who have no other option but to do as much. If the three sections – Dhubri-Guwahati, Pandu-Dibrugarh and Dibrugarh-Sadiya – are used to the hilt, life would be so much easier for the people living on either banks of the Brahmaputra but have only three bridges to help them cross over to the other side.
Is someone listening?
