NEW DELHI — India's remote northeast region has been both blessed and cursed by its geography. The region is rich in natural resources but is landlocked and surrounded by China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan, leaving it impoverished.
The eight-state region may finally get a chance to start living up to its economic potential with several projects to enhance connections with Southeast Asia and to increase outlets for such commodities as organic foods, orchids, tea, coal and oil.
Now, the only way to move major quantities of goods between northeast India and Southeast Asia is through Bangladesh.
But authorities in Myanmar and India are nearing final approval of a $100-million river project giving northeast India direct access to the Indian Ocean through Myanmar, said Abhijit Barooah, chairman of the northeastern chapter of the Confederation of Indian Industry, India's premier business association.
The project envisages facilitating movement of cargo from India's Mizoram state to Myanmar's port at Sittwe, via the Kaladan River.
In addition, talks have begun between companies in northeast India and Thailand after a trade-promotion conference in Bangkok in October, said Lemli Loyi, assistant general manager at the state-run North Eastern Development Finance Corp. Loyi expressed hope that the talks would result in increased business and possible joint ventures.
India first enunciated a "look east" policy, an economic and strategic orientation toward Southeast Asia, in 1992. It had its genesis at the end of the Cold War, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having lost the Soviet economic and political support on which it had relied, the Indian government embarked on a program of free-market restructuring at home and sought new markets and economic partners abroad.
Officials envisaged that the eight northeast states -- Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Mizoram -- would emerge as a trading hub for two dynamic regions connected by a network of highways, railways, pipelines and transmission lines. The region is home to about 40 million people.
But progress has been slow. The region's isolation dates to the 1800s.
"Nineteenth-century British colonial decisions to draw lines between the hills and the plains, to put barriers on trade between Bhutan and Assam, and to treat Burma as a buffer against French Indochina and China severed the region from its traditional trade routes -- the southern trails of the Silk Road," said Sanjib Baruah, a professor of political science at Bard College in New York and an expert on northeast India.
