Amitendu Palit
The Financial Express
Asian connectivity has assumed a whole new meaning with high-speed rail linking people and places not only within the countries, but also across countries.
China had begun the process a few years ago by laying out the design of an ambitious rail road network. Now South Korea has also followed suit. New rail links within, and from these countries, are being complemented by upcoming networks across Southeast Asia.
A key project plans to link China to upper Southeast Asia by connecting the former to the CLMV group of countries in the region—Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam—along with Thailand. The specifics of the project include rail corridors from Kunming in China’s western province of Yunnan to Vientiane in Laos, which would produce further connections to Bangkok in Thailand, Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi in Vietnam. The link will eventually extend right up to the tip of South China Sea and connect Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. This remarkable pan-Asian rail network bridging Northeast and Southeast Asia is expected to be ready by 2020.
Asian countries have begun investing enormous resources in internal rail networks. South Korea has announced ambitious plans for upgrading its high-speed domestic train network. The plans involve increasing both frequency and speed of trains. ‘Bullet’ is the buzzword in Asia’s rail revolution. By 2020, Korean bullet trains are expected to cover distances in almost half the time that ordinary fast trains do now. This would be similar to what China is doing. Running times from Beijing to Tianjin and Shanghai to Hangzhou have slashed by 30 minutes and 50 minutes, respectively, from more than an hour, and just under two hours, earlier. These remarkable improvements are courtesy bullet trains that can record running speeds up to 250 km per hour. Another noticeable addition to the high-speed train family in China would be the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train. The train will cut commuting time between China’s two largest cities in the North and South separated by around 1,500 km to just over four hours from more than ten hours now.
Rail is the biggest thing happening to Asia’s infrastructure after the budget airlines, which had taken the region by storm. Low-cost air carriers connected remote parts of Asia in a manner that was almost inconceivable. Chengdu, Siem Reap, Lombok, Sabah, Chiang Mai, Penang, Jogjakarta, Darwin and several other places, considered difficult to access in Asia-Pacific, are now directly connected to major cities in the region by budget carriers. The biggest beneficiary of the dense network of air connections has been the travel and tourism industry. Asia-Pacific could have hardly attracted more than 200 million tourists annually, as it is doing now, had low-cost air connectivity not picked up at an amazing pace.
Why is rail now the priority infrastructure for Asia? No other infrastructure offers greater scope and scale as far as mobility of people is concerned. China’s rail infrastructure, for example, is geared towards offering people the opportunity of moving back and forth between locations in less time and effort. For industry, such fast mobility implies having access to labour not tied down to locations and, therefore, not prone to demands for location-specific facilities like housing and recreation, which they would have demanded otherwise.
Industry in India hardly enjoys such advantages. Large-scale plants in India’s hinterland, located deep within states, do not benefit from easy access to labour, which can commute back and forth from residential locations, due to lack of good transport links. From an Asian perspective, growth of a regional train network will enable movement of labour across countries enabling more efficient functioning of production networks across the region. Indeed, in this respect, multi-country rail networks are not only conduits for faster movement of people, but are equally important for speedier transport of cargo as well. It is high time that India becomes proactive in embedding itself in the upcoming Asian rail networks.
Apart from creating vital backward and forward linkages between industry on one hand and labour and raw materials on the other, investment on rail networks also produce virtuous multiplier effects for host economies by generating new employment and income. The Beijing-Shanghai rail link entails an investment of $33 billion. Vietnam is constructing a high-speed rail corridor between Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi at an estimated investment of $55 billion. All other ambitious internal and cross-country rail projects coming up in the region involve substantial investments. The immediate impact of these projects has been to generate employment and increase demand for industrial raw materials like steel. Thus, both consumer and producer incomes have increased in a mutually reinforcing manner. There could hardly have been a more effective way of pushing back the rut created by the financial crisis.
There’s a flipside to the rail story though; something that has begun dawning gradually upon the countries. High-speed rail links are heavily energy-intensive. Building and maintaining the corridors will result in quantum leaps in energy consumptions. Not only does that have implications for future costs, particularly with respect to higher energy imports, there are also worries over the projects resulting in carbon emissions rising steadily over time. Till now, there is little evidence of the projects being planned on green technologies.
While rail has spurred the engine of growth in Asia and will keep it chugging in foreseeable future, it might have brought for the region other worries. As of now, Asia is embracing ‘bullets’ and does not appear too concerned over what they might do to the atmosphere.
The author is visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies in the National University of Singapore. These are his personal views.
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