India lags behind China in border infrastructure, panel says

[Zarvan]

NEW DELHI: India continues to lag far behind China in its plans to construct border military infrastructure for swifter mobility of troops and weapons, which Manohar Parrikar will realize during his first visit to the northeast as defence minister.

Accompanied by Army chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag and others, Parrikar on Saturday is also slated to visit Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, which much like eastern Ladakh continues to be a major flashpoint between India and China. Also on the cards is a visit to the Bum La pass located on the border.

Parrikar's experience there may be akin to what his predecessor AK Antony described as "an eye opener" in 2007. When Antony for the first time looked across the Nathu La border post in east Sikkim, the realisation finally hit home that China had constructed high-quality roads right till their military outposts along most stretches of the unresolved 4,057km line of actual control (LAC).

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Indian troops, in turn, had to struggle through treacherous terrain on foot to reach their forward positions in many sectors, with no proper roads and lateral links as well as the complete lack of rail connectivity.



Eight years later, the story remains somewhat same. "In case of war, the (Indian) Army cannot reach Tawang area in a day. While our neighbouring country can reach the border within two or three hours, our Army takes more than a day to reach there. This is a matter of great concern with regard to our defence preparedness," the parliamentary standing committee on defence said this week, expressing great "dismay".

Leave along the stark asymmetry in military capabilities, India's much-touted plans to build the infrastructure all along the LAC continue to flounder. Only 19 of the 73 "strategic" all-weather roads (which add up to 3,812km) identified for construction along the LAC for better troop mobility almost a decade ago, for instance, have been fully completed till now.

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This when all the 73 roads, with more east-west lateral links as well as better access routes to strategic peaks and valleys, were to be completed by 2012. The Border Roads Organization (BRO), which has completed only 19 roads (625km) of the 61 roads (3,410km) entrusted to it, continues to regularly miss deadlines.

With the BRO directly under the MoD now, instead of the being part of the road transport ministry earlier, the progress will be much faster now, contend officials. The government is also working to ensure faster land acquisition as well as environmental clearances, which have been among the main reasons for the long delays, they add.

Incidentally, noting the BRO faced "an acute shortage" of manpower, vehicles and requisite machinery, the parliamentary committee said, "In order to compete with our neighbouring countries, especially China, BRO must have the latest, state-of-the-art equipment."

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The MoD, on its part, says 16 of the strategic India-China border roads will be completed this year, with another 13 by 2016, nine by 2017, two by 2018, and the rest thereafter. But only time will tell if these revised deadlines are met.

India lags behind China in border infrastructure, panel says - The Times of India

 

[kakathiya]

What about the roads to democracy and justice?
Tibetan railway line to the southern city of Shigatse.The bridge over the Yarlung Tsangpo(Brahmaputra), near Shigatse was completed in September.
Xinhua then reported: “Along with the 32-meter-long T-shaped beam which was put slowly on the pier of the No.1 grand bridge of Lhasa-Shigatse railway over the Yarlung Tsangpo River by the bridge layer, the track-laying of the Lhasa-Shigatse railway has spanned the Yarlung Zangbo River for the first time.”
In a recent Rediff article, ('India should take a lesson from what China thinks and does'), I quote some Arunachali friends saying "For roads and infrastructure, the Chinese are very much in advance on us".
It is a fact that basic infrastructure (roads, airports, railway, etc.) is far more developed in Tibet than in the Indian Himalayas.
Another example, yesterday Xinhua announced that the world's highest wind farm at 4,700 meters has gone into operation in Nagchu prefecture.
The Chinese news agency says that the five turbines of the first phase have a capacity of 7.5 megawatts. The completed project will have 33 wind turbines capable of putting out 49.5 megawatts.
That is good, but at the same time, China (and particularly Tibet) is very socially backward, especially as far as governance is concerned.
Does Beijing realize that this undermines its 'peaceful raise'?
The Study Times, the magazine of the Chinese Communist Party Central Party School, recently discussed how to resolve the social conflicts recurrently occurring in China. Many watchers believe that in the years to come, it will be Beijing's problem no 1 to solve.
The magazine categorizes the social conflicts into six types: conflicts caused by differences in income, conflicts caused by misaligned policies, conflicts caused by growing 'social anxiety', conflicts caused by a lack of proper administrative control over the Internet, conflicts caused by the abuse of government power, and conflicts caused by incomplete reforms.
The author conveniently forgets to mention conflicts due to regional aspirations (in Tibet and Xinjiang for example), but he offers some suggestions for solving the other conflicts:

1. Relying more on the people to enhance social policies;
2. Establishing a comprehensive 'social management system';
3. Building a widespread 'psychosocial intervention mechanism' by setting positive social expectations; and
4. Improving Internet administration by acquiring the latest technologies.

However today, not only the Communist Party is not ready to 'rely' on the People, but 'improving Internet administration', clearly means more and more policing of what the people say, think, dream, control over their aspirations, their genuine problems and this, by using the 'latest technologies'.
In this field, India is decades ahead of China.
China which pretends to be a 'great power' has no clue about what the UN Declaration of Human Rights means.
Take the example of Nelson Mandela's funerals, Xinhua headlined: “Mandela, Mao shared similarities"; it quoted some declarations supposedly made by the South African ambassador to China.
But while Mandela's Nobel Peace Prize was the symbol of national reconciliation and a reward for the steps he took to lead his country towards democracy, Mao's dictatorial tendencies translated into his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and his Great Leap Forward which was responsible for widespread starvation: the latest academic estimates of the consequences of Mao's follies are put at some 45 million deaths.
Though the exact words of the South African Ambassador are not known, how to compare the anti-apartheid leader with Mao, who colonized more than half of what is today the Peoples' Republic of China and killed tens of millions of Chinese (and Tibetans).
Today, it is under China's pressure that the Dalai Lama was twice denied a visa to South Africa.
At the same time, The Global Times slammed the comparisons between the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate, Liu Xiabao and Nelson Mandela.
The South China Morning Post wrote: "In the wake of Mandela's death last week, some Western commentators and Chinese social media users have criticized Beijing for praising the former South African leader a while cracking down on its own dissidents, such as Liu [Xiaobo]. Some commentators have also noted similarities between the two Nobel Peace Prize winners, who were both jailed for their political activism, but The Global Times dismissed the correlation, saying the West is using Liu's case to defy China's judicial sovereignty and smear its human rights record".

China: a road to democracy?
In an editorial, The Global Times praised Mandela's "struggles, tolerance and efforts to bridge differences" while calling Liu "a Chinese prisoner who confronted authorities and was rejected by mainstream Chinese society."
Roads and railway lines are good and China should be praised for it, but the roads (and why not the train) to Democracy, Justice or Equality, are also important if China is one day to become a 'great power'.
The Middle Kingdom is far, far behind in this field and its new leadership does not seem to have the will to remedy this.It is a tragedy.

Total road mileage nearly doubles in Tibet
China Tibet Online
December 10, 2013
The total road mileage in Tibet nearly doubled from 35,583 kilometers to 65,176 kilometers from 2002 to 2012, People.com reported.
The total mileage of new and renovated road in Tibet reached 39,157 kilometers during this period.
Transportation in Tibet developed quickly in the recent decade with a hefty investment of 53 billion yuan (8 billion US dollars), among which 10 billion yuan was invested in 2012, the largest amount of its kind, said Tashi Gyatso, head of Tibet Transportation Department.
"Besides the increase of total mileage, the grades also get higher," he added.
The improving transportation infrastructures help to boom local economic development.

A New Airport In Lhasa ...and one in Amdo

Haixi Huatugou Airport in Amdo (Qinghai)
On August 30, I quoted Xinhua, announcing that Sichuan Province will soon have its fourth high-altitude airfield, “which local officials hope will boost tourism in the heavily Tibetan-populated region.”
The new Hongyuan Airport is located in Ngaba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture at an altitude of 3,535 meters. The Prefecture is situated in northwestern Sichuan, at the border of Gansu and Qinghai provinces.
Less than two weeks later, Xinhua now reports that Qinghai Province 'located on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau' will be home to another airport.
The Huatugou aviation airport, presently under-construction, is being built in the Mongolian-Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Haixi.
The Qinghai Airport Company said the airport will cover an area of 180 hectares and it will cost 114 million U.S. dollars.
It is a big investment for a Prefecture which, according the 2010 census, has 489,338 inhabitants only.
The airport will have a 3,600 meters runway and a terminal covering an area of some 3,000 square meters, which is relatively small.
The airport is expected to be completed within a year.
Why an airport in this area?
Xinhua gives one of rationales: "the airport is located in China's major production base for petroleum and potash fertilizer. It is expected to support local development."
Probably, the ‘local development’ with Chinese characteristics, in other words, 'Chinese economy at large'!
In 2011, a Chinese article gave a hint of the Chinese intentions: "The region is an important base for the production of crude oil; the surrounding is rich in oil, asbestos, potash and other scarce resources. The asbestos reserves rank first in the country; reserves of petroleum prospects are estimated at 1.1 billion tons. Though Qinghai is an important base for the production of crude oil, due to the remoteness, the limited transport conditions, the growth of the local economic and social development is restricted."
With connections to Xining, Delinkha, Golmud, Dunhuang, Gansu and Xinjiang, the new airport is expected to have an annual turn-over of 90,000 passengers and 100 tons of goods by 2020.
One understands better why it is a worthwhile investment.

Hongyuan Airport under construction

Further, the new airport is located close to the Xining-Golmund-Lhasa railway line and the China National Highway 315 (G315) which runs from Xining, the capital of Qinghai to Kashgar in Xinjiang. The 3,063 kilometres long highway passed in Delinkha. The new infrastructure will be used to link the restive province of Xinjiang with the Tibetan plateau. It can be useful in case of ‘disturbances’.
But there is more.
In 2010, I mentioned on this blog that DF-21C missiles were deployed in the same area. After The Times of India had ‘broken the news’ that Chinese missiles were deployed near the Indian border, Hans M. Kristensen of the FAS Strategic Security Blog had clarified: “The latest Pentagon report on Chinese military forces recently triggered sensational headlines in the Indian news media that China had deployed new nuclear missiles close to the Indian border. The news reports got it wrong, but new commercial satellite images reveal that launch units for the new DF-21C missile have deployed to central-western China.”
The area mentioned by the US report is not far from the new Hongyuan ‘civil’ airport.
In the meantime, in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the authorities are actively planning to open a second airport for Lhasa.
On September 7, it was reported that the Lhasa Party’s Secretary Qizha La (or Choedrak in Tibetan) went for an inspection tour on the site of the new airport.
The Tibet Daily said that preliminary planning and design work were carried out. Choedrak asked the people to fully understand the practical significance of the construction of this new airport.
The Township of Lhasa attaches “great importance to further strengthening the organization by building a first-class international airport,” he said.
The objective of his visit was to accelerate the planning, design and other preparatory work for the project which should be implemented as soon as possible, according to the mouthpiece of the Party.


Choedrak, mayor of Lhasa on the site
Choedrak gave the usual speech: “the construction of the new airport in Lhasa will promote leapfrog development and long-term stability; it will strengthen national defense modernization; and will give full play to the role of Lhasa, the capital city [of Tibet]”.
It will also accelerate the overall well-being of the society: “All relevant departments should fully understand the important practical significance and far-reaching historical significance of the construction of a new airport in Lhasa; they should unify their thinking, attention, and effectively do all the pre-planning study for the new airport.”
On the long-term, the authorities want to "build a first-class international airport". For the purpose, “it is necessary to scientifically research, to keep high standards in the construction for this first-class airport in Tibet”, said Choedrak, a Tibetan cadre who added that builders should focus on all aspects of the construction of the new airport, i.e. water, electricity, road networks and other works in order to promote economic and social development.
Though Choedrak used the usual Communist jargon, the fact remains that Lhasa will have soon a second ‘first-class international’.
What does it mean for the Tibetan culture?
Probably something like the Reservations in the West of the United States!