Roads to riches

(This article is part of our special package on Myanmar. Read more articles here.)

Myanmar's leader, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, has extended an invitation to ethnic armed groups for a "21st Century Panglong Conference". The proposal evokes her father Aung San's 1947 Panglong Conference, in which separate ethnic armed groups agreed to form the Union of Burma. Many ethnic minority leaders see the 1947 event as a precedent for a federal governance mechanism. As the country considers a 'new bargain', the focus is on two interlinked debates: whether and how to split benefits from resource extraction, and who would control the reach of new infrastructure development and service delivery.

The map of Myanmar looks like a diamond-shaped kite – with the northern point formed by the Kachin State in the eastern-most Himalaya, and Tanintharyi Region, next to Thailand in the south-east, making up the tail. The two bars of the kite are nascent "development corridors." The east-west trade route is part of a planned land-and-sea Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor, while the north-south line connects Myanmar's two largest cities, Mandalay and Yangon. On that north-south route, the country's only high-speed expressway is expanding, with the electric grid and the best telecoms coverage spreading along with it.