Fantasy highway

Neither the title – Asian Land Transport Infrastructure Development Project – nor its acronym, ALTID, rolls off the tongue. The sombre and somewhat vague designation seems inappropriate for such an ambitious undertaking – nothing less than building a standardised transportation network across Asia, linking the continent to Europe. This colossal stab at creating connectivity is to be achieved through two modes of transport: the Asian Highway and the Trans-Asian Railway. In their final avatars, these will consist of over 140,000 km of road and railroad tracks, each spanning over 32 countries. That is what has long been promised, anyway. After Bangladesh signed on during the past month, all of the countries in Southasia are today, technically, members of ALTID. But even this latest move highlights the difficulty of ever bringing this vision to fruition.

The push to build the two networks first came from the United Nations in the early 1960s. But it was abandoned, after some work had been done, during the 1970s due to a lack of funds. Thereafter, no progress was possible during the two decades of Cold War. Both ideas were then revived in 1992, when the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the UN's regional development body, launched ALTID. Over a decade later, progress has been erratic. Today, the only stretch where construction work is complete is the so-called North-South Corridor of Asian Highway 3, which runs from China to Cambodia via Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. That only this sector is complete is curious in itself, considering the fact that most of the construction work on AH-3 entails upgrading dirt roads or repairing stretches of run-down track, rather than building from scratch.