The Hindu : No entry on an open border

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 24, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

No entry on an open border

By C. Raja Mohan

RAXAUL Dec. 23. Entering Raxaul in Bihar from Birganj in Nepal, one moves from the third world to the fourth. New Delhi might fancy itself as one of the world's most dynamic economies and an emerging great power. At Raxaul, you would not know. There is nothing "shining" about India here.

On the Nepali side of the border there is some dignity, including an arched gateway welcoming visitors. India's official institutions on this border are naked amid the prevailing anarchy. There is not even a small notice saying you are on Indian soil. The all-enveloping chaos is proof-enough that you are in "incredible India"!

Trucks, oil tankers and bullock carts have jammed up what you can barely call a road. One of the main arteries of trade between India and Nepal is now a long stretch of mud and potholes at Raxaul. If its institutions on the borders define a nation-state, Raxaul reflects the profound decay in India's border management.

Sitting atop the chaos in front of a narrow bridge that brings you into India is the customs house that is hard pressed to cope with the huge commercial traffic. There is not enough space to inspect the incoming trucks. The different border barriers of the Indian state are dispersed. As you run between different windows of the mighty Indian state, watch out, you might get robbed.

On a good day, you might get a truck through customs in one piece at Raxaul in 24 hours. It could be a lot worse. At another crossing of the Nepal border near Naxalbari in West Bengal, the situation is marginally better. Local road infrastructure has barely survived thanks to the lower volume of traffic.

But Indian officials at Naxalbari say a truck carrying tea from Nepal would take normally eight days to be cleared. Yes, eight full days! The food inspecting laboratories are located all the way down in Kolkata.

The Indo-Nepal border might be free in theory. But commerce does not flow easily across it — thanks to the obstacle race that the infrastructure on the Indian side has become.

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While India has failed to maintain its natural geographic access to Nepal in good shape, a modern Chinese infrastructure is steadily moving closer. Seeking to globalise Tibet and Xinjiang, Beijing is rapidly developing infrastructure to improve the connectivity of these remote provinces to the rest of China and to the neighbouring countries.

A rail line from Chinese heartland is expected to arrive in Tibet's capital Lhasa by 2007. Many oil pipelines are also being brought into Tibet. Once the Chinese transport and energy infrastructure is in place in Tibet and Xinjiang, Beijing will have no problem extending it to landlocked and petroleum-poor Nepal.

The story here is not about a creeping "China threat" in Nepal. The expansion of Chinese infrastructure into inner Asia is a natural consequence of the nation's rapid economic growth. India's interests lie in extending its own transport links into the Asian heartland.

Nepal is the natural bridge between India and China. If New Delhi does not act in time to modernise its connectivity to Nepal and extend it further, Beijing will naturally step into that vacuum.

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New Delhi is waking up to the dangerous consequences of its collapsing infrastructure on the borders with Nepal, if somewhat slowly. Studies on improving the infrastructure on key points of the Indo-Nepal border have been commissioned.

An International Container Depot will soon begin operations in Birganj making transhipment easier. Modern X-ray machinery for non-intrusive inspection of trucks is likely to be put in place shortly. And more testing facilities will be built closer to the borders.

Addressing a conference in Kathmandu last week, the Indian Ambassador to Nepal, Shyam Saran, said India was ready to extend its railway lines to major border towns in Nepal.

There were many Indian rail heads lying just south of the border, and for whatever reasons both sides had failed to take advantage of this until now.

India was also offering to extend its network of oil pipelines to the distribution centres inside Nepal. Today, 30 per cent of the traffic across the border was made up by oil tankers. Replacing this primitive and hazardous mode of energy transportation with pipelines could immediately bring down energy costs inside Nepal and ease congestion on the border.

If these ideas are not really new, why has India taken so long to put them on the table? New Delhi has allowed the management of the sensitive boundary with Nepal to be shaped by the sum of the narrow perspectives of different Indian agencies that man the frontier.

It was also easy to pass the blame on to the poor governance in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

National security, after all, is New Delhi's responsibility. It is time the Central Government put together a strategic plan for the rapid development of infrastructure on the Indo-Nepal border and begin to implement with some political urgency.

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