India wary as China inks $1.3bn Myanmar port deal
BEIJING : India will be closely following developments following an agreement between China and Myanmar on Thursday to develop a multi-billion dollar deep sea port at Kyaukpyu on the Bay of Bengal.
Located on the western coast of Myanmar in Rakhine state, the scaled-down port, part of a special economic zone (SEZ), will not be far from a submarine base that India is developing on its east coast, close to Visakhapatnam.
It will be the third China-built port in India’s neighbourhood, after Gwadar in Pakistan and
Hambantota in Sri Lanka. China is also funding the development of Chittagong port in Bangladesh.
Though the total investment by China and Myanmar in the Kyaukpyu project has been scaled down to $1.3 billion for the initial phase, from an earlier figure of $7 billion, the upcoming port will be of great strategic significance to Beijing as it navigates its way into the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, considered within New Delhi’s sphere of influence.
Oil and natural gas pipelines are already functioning between the fishing town of Kyaukpyu and Kunming in China’s Yunnan province, bordering Myanmar.
For Myanmar, the project promises employment to 100,000 and $15 billion in tax revenues in future, according to China’s state media. Reports said the port will have an “annual gross output of $3.2 billion”.
The China-Myanmar deal took years to finalise because of differences on “financing and other issues”, the Global Times tabloid reported.
“At a ceremony in Nay Pyi Taw, the Chinese consortium led by State-owned conglomerate Citic Group signed the framework agreement with the Kyaukpyu Special Economic Zone Management Committee on the development of the deep-sea port,” the report said.