Government aiming to make Northeast ‘a gateway to Southeast Asia’: Modi
NEW DELHI/SHILLONG: The government aims to make the Northeast a gateway to Southeast Asia and was making huge investments for the overall development of the region, but lack of cleanliness could hamper this dream, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday.
“If such a beautiful gateway is unclean, diseased, illiterate or disbalanced, then it will fail to cross the gateway of the country’s development. There is no reason why, with all our resources, we should remain backward or poor,” the prime minister said.
Addressing the centenary celebrations of the prominent voluntary organisation, Bharat Sevashram Sangha, in Shillong through video conferencing, he lamented that “only Gangtok had found a place among the first 50 clean cities”, out of the 12 cities from the Northeast surveyed as part of the recent nationwide cleanliness survey.
While four Northeastern cities found a place between 100 and 200 clean cities, seven were positioned between 200 and 300, with Shillong being the 276th, he said while stressing that ‘Swachhata’ or cleanliness was a major challenge for everyone in the region.
“We have to make the Northeast a gateway for Southeast Asia,” Modi said, adding if this gateway is dirty, then the dream would not be fulfilled and asked the people and organisations like the Sangha to join hands with the state governments and their agencies in the cleanliness campaign.
Observing that there has been no balanced development in the entire Northeast so many years after Independence, Modi said his government, “with all its resources”, had planned to bring about balanced development of the states here. He said the major thrust was to improve connectivity and develop the entire region for tourism purposes.
“All these initiatives will help to make the Northeast the gateway of Southeast Asia,” he said.
While an investment of Rs400 billion is being made to improve the road infrastructure in the entire Northeast, 19 big railway projects have also been started in the region, he said.