India looking into options to restart India-Myanmar-Thailand highway project: Jaishankar

Bangkok: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that it is the government's top priority to find means to restart the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway because it has been a "very difficult project" due to the circumstances in Myanmar, according to on Saturday.

Jaishankar is here to take part in the BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers' Retreat and the 12th Mekong Ganga Cooperation (MGC) Mechanism Foreign Ministers' Meeting.

He said with good road connectivity, the movement of goods, the movement of people will undergo an enormous change.

"But it has been a very difficult project. It has been a very difficult project mainly because of the situation in Myanmar. And one of our priorities today is to find ways of how to resume this project, how to unlock it, and how to make it because large parts of the project have been built," Jaishankar said.

India, Thailand and Myanmar are working on about 1,400-km-long highway that would link the country with Southeast Asia by land and give a boost to trade, business, health, education and tourism ties among the three countries.

Around 70 per cent of construction work on the ambitious India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway has been completed.

The highway will connect Moreh in Manipur, India with Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar.

The strategic highway project has been delayed. Earlier, the government was aiming to make the highway operational by December 2019.

On India's ties with Thailand, Jaishankar said the relationship with Thailand goes back in history.

"This is a historic and cultural relationship of many centuries. It is a relationship was started flowering again after independence. It got greater momentum in the 1990s. But the last 10 years have been a very, very different period for this relationship," he said.

During his address, he also spoke about the economic growth in India.

"If you look at major economies in the world today, there are not many major economies which are growing above 5 per cent. We hope today despite all the problems in the world to come closer to 7 per cent growth," Jaishankar said.

He also praised the contribution made by the Indian community in Thailand during the Covid pandemic.

He also highlighted the changes happening in India.

Speaking about digitisation in India, he said from Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg from Satya Nadella to Elon Musk, everybody today is looking at digital India and looking at how digital talent and the digital infrastructure is today being applied to governance.

"That is really you know, when we say confidently that we have it in us in the next 25 years to become a developed country," Jaishankar said.

Speaking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership, he said, "We used to be once regarded as a country very difficult on climate change. Today, we are seen as one of the leaders of climate change."

He said the biggest proposals on climate change in the last 10 years came from Prime Minister Modi's side.

Talking about the Ukraine-Russia war, he said, "There's a grain shortage in the world, which is made worse by the fact that grain is not coming out of Ukraine and Russia," he said.

Jaishankar said Prime Minister Modi is the one who is pushing the idea to grow millets which require less water and there are many new sources of millets.

"I'm not minimising the challenges, there will be problems. You can't be the most populous country in the world and not have problems. You can't be a developing country and not have challenges but the issue today is how firmly with what conviction with what determination with what vision and leadership, we are addressing some of this," he said.

With PTI inputs