DHAKA, September 19 — A retired Bangladeshi general has laid out why the roads and ports meant to stitch South and Southeast Asia together cannot deliver on their promise without political dialogue, local participation and sustained regional stability. Writing in A Journal of Analysis and News, Brig Gen (Retd) Hasan Md Shamsuddin surveyed the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project and the border-management measures around them, and reached a plain conclusion: infrastructure alone is not enough.
The highway, roughly 1,360 kilometres long, is intended to link Moreh in India’s Manipur state with Mae Sot in Thailand, running through Myanmar’s Sagaing Region. The Kaladan project is designed to connect Kolkata with Mizoram through Sittwe Port and the Kaladan River in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
Its port and river terminals are operational, but the 109-kilometre road link to the Mizoram border remains under construction, with a revised completion target of 2027.
Conflict has slowed the work
Conflict in Chin and Rakhine States has disrupted progress on these routes. Instability in Manipur and along India’s border with Myanmar has exposed the limits of relying on infrastructure without an equally strong political and security framework, the article argues. Several promised connectivity initiatives have faced delay or suspension.
India’s stakes in Myanmar are threefold, according to the piece: stabilizing its northeastern frontier, advancing the Act East Policy, and balancing China’s growing influence. India introduced its Look East Policy in 1991 and upgraded it to the Act East Policy in 2014 to strengthen economic and strategic ties with Southeast Asia.
Beyond the main corridors, India has considered additional Land Customs Stations, including Avangkhu in Nagaland, and expanded trade through Nampong and Pangsau Pass in Arunachal Pradesh. Border haats, the small cross-border markets, could support local commerce and livelihoods.
Bangladesh’s own eastern turn
Bangladesh began giving greater attention to Southeast Asia and regional cooperation in the 1980s and developed its Look East Policy in 2001–2002. It rests on strategic balance: reducing excessive dependence on a limited number of markets, attracting investment from ASEAN members, China, Japan and South Korea, and expanding regional connectivity while maintaining productive relations with India and Western partners. Recent high-level visits to Malaysia and China have given the approach new momentum.
On the humanitarian side, the article states that regional security cannot be achieved without a durable solution for the roughly 1.3 million displaced Rohingya, a crisis it calls one of Bangladesh’s most serious foreign-policy and humanitarian challenges. What the piece proposes is a coordinated, security-conscious and commercially practical framework for regional engagement and shared development.
Its closing argument is that the region’s long-term prosperity will depend on diplomacy, practical compromise and sustained cooperation rather than further violence. For the communities along these routes, the next markers to watch are the 2027 target for the Kaladan road link, the fate of the proposed Land Customs Stations, and whether political conditions in Chin, Rakhine and Manipur allow any of it to move.
