The new trans-Asian highway project has economic potential for the region

India signed an international agreement at Shanghai last week to facilitate commencement of work on a 1,40,000 km-long Asian Highway to enhance regional co-operation under the aegis of the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific. The other signatories to the agreement are Pakistan, China, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam. The highway project is an attempt to overcome constraints imposed by geography on development. Landlocked countries with no access to seaports will immensely benefit from its construction. It has the potential to increase international trade and traffic across land and sea routes that connect various national capitals, major ports, commercial centres and tourist sites. When it is completed it will connect Tokyo in Japan with Istanbul in Turkey and has enormous economic, social and political implications for all countries in Asia.

The signatory states are in different stages of economic development and the international highway would enable increased mobility of labour and resources in an era of global sourcing. A streamlined overland connectivity would help to improve industrial activity and energise economic growth. Highway development in this case would essentially entail integration and standardisation of existing highways among the signatory states with new stretches of road being laid to fill in the gaps wherever the need arises. Construction of highways has economic spin-offs that benefit different sectors of economies, especially transportation and construction industries, and will lead to employment generation on a large scale in all the countries.

The ambitious project was conceived 12 years ago and is expected to be complete by 2010. Once complete, the highway would offer an alternative mode of travel and to that extent would diminish dependence on air travel in the absence of tight time constraints like in the case of tourism. It would promote tourism by making overland travel cheaper. In political terms this agreement symbolises the change in intra-regional relations that characterises the post-cold war period in Asia. Evidently the earlier equations based on political considerations between many of the signatory states have given way to economic ones. A case in point is India-China relations. The futuristic highway holds much promise to shrink the civilisational, ethnic and economic schisms that continue to characterise Asia. It should facilitate greater social and economic intercourse between Asian nations, which will contribute to closer people-to-people relations and thereby serve to strengthen Asian solidarity. Eventually the Asian Highway would help to dilute imbalances in the region and thereby reduce the North-South disparity in the future.