Agartala: A 51-km four-lane road will be developed to enable carriage of people and material for northeast India via Bangladesh, a visiting Bangladeshi minister said here yesterday.
According to Bangladesh Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader, the road, to be built as a jointly-funded project, will link Tripura’s capital city of Agartala with Bangladesh’s Ashuganj river port.
“Bangladesh has undertaken an ambitious Rs1,608 crore project to develop the highways between Agartala and Ashuganj port,” the minister told reporters, adding that “of the Rs1,608 crore, Rs1,578 crore would be provided by the Indian government to expand and improve the highways”.
“The 51-km road would have four lanes to carry heavy cargo and passenger vehicles bound for Agartala and other northeastern states.”
There is only a narrow land corridor connecting the northeastern region to the rest of India through Assam and West Bengal but this route passes through hilly terrain with steep gradients and multiple hairpin bends, making plying of vehicles — especially loaded trucks — very difficult.
Agartala via Guwahati is 1,650km from Kolkata by road and 2,637km from New Delhi. But the distance between Agartala and Kolkata via Bangladesh is just about 350km.
The minister, accompanied by Indian high commissioner in Dhaka Pankaj Saran and other Bangladeshi officials, visited Agartala to review the road development project.
Quader also held a meeting with the Tripura Transport Minister Manik Dey here.
India has spent millions of rupees to develop the Ashuganj port over the Meghna river in eastern Bangladesh.
Carrying heavy machinery, goods and essentials from various parts of India and abroad to mountainous northeastern states via Bangladesh holds significance.
To meet the demands of Tripura, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) recently ferried 10,000 tonnes of rice in two phases from Visakhapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh via Bangladesh.
Several ships carried the rice from Visakhapatnam port to Kolkata port, then to Ashuganj port in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi trucks then ferried the rice to the FCI warehouses from Ashuganj port to Nandannagar near Agartala.
The Indian government is also holding talks with Bangladesh to transport another 35,000 tonnes of rice for Tripura via Bangladesh.
In 2012, Bangladesh allowed state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to ferry heavy machinery, turbines and over-dimensional cargoes through Ashuganj port for the 726 MW Palatana mega power project in southern Tripura.
The train services in Tripura, Manipur, Mizoram and southern Assam have been suspended from October 1, 2014 for track conversion — from metre gauge to broad gauge — work. This work, undertaken by the Northeast Frontier Railways, is scheduled to be completed by March 2016.
IANS
Washington: Beyond the symbolism of President Barack Obama being the first US president to be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day, his second visit to India in four years promises to galvanise India-US ties. There is also a great deal of speculation about who gains more from the visit — Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is said to have staged a diplomatic coup with his invitation to Obama or a lame-duck US president half-way through his second and final term in office.
But, the real significance of the visit is the fact that Obama would be meeting Modi in a formal setting less than four months after he came calling to Washington and the two vowed to “Chalein Saath Saath: Forward Together We Go.”
It would give them an opportunity to check how far they have come on the ambitious road they charted and put India-US ties back on track after months of drift over the Khobragade affair, a stalled nuclear deal, trade issues and a lot more.
“It’s a really big deal,” as Rick Rossow, Wadhwani chair in India in US-India policy studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a leading Washington think tank put it at a media preview of the trip.
It shows the US officials are again looking at it as a 20, 30-year relationship, ready to help India become a stronger friend and partner and willing to spend the time and energy to fix some of the problems from the past, he said.
“So it is extremely significant for the president to go back to India a second time, to do it only as an India trip, to be the guest for Republic Day. The symbolism of all this is tremendous,” Rossow said expecting to see “some pretty big announcements.”
Officials from both sides have been scrambling to tick things outlined in their September vision statement when Modi came quickly, seizing the hand of friendship extended by Obama, without begrudging denial of a US visa for nearly a decade.
Underlining the importance of the visit, Secretary of State John Kerry at the cost of some international embarrassment, chose to skip the Paris unity rally after the attack on Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, to keep his date with Modi at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit.
IANS
