President Kovind to hand over Sittwe port in Rakhine to Myanmar

Senior South Block officials told Hindustan Times on condition of anonymity that the Sittwe port will allow Indian goods to be taken through the Aizawl-Zorinpui-Palletwa axis to the navigable part of the Kaladan river.

Published on: Sep 13, 2018, 24:04:56 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Nearly two decades after the launch of the Kaladan multi-modal link project, president Ram Nath Kovind will hand-over the India- developed Sittwe port in Rakhine to a state-designated operator in Myanmar in December, a move that opens India’s landlocked north-east to the Bay of Bengal through Mizoram as well as provide alternative connectivity to Kolkata without goods taking the circuitous route through the Siliguri corridor.

Senior South Block officials told Hindustan Times on condition of anonymity that the Sittwe port will allow Indian goods to be taken through the Aizawl-Zorinpui-Palletwa axis to the navigable part of the Kaladan river. It is from Palletwa that the barges will be used to ferry Indian goods to the Sittwe port. The Indian plan to develop Sittwe port was conceived during the previous NDA regime with then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh piloting the project. The port will be handed over to Myanmar by President Kovind, who is scheduled to travel to Myanmar in second week of December.

The port is part of India’s larger efforts to develop its North-East by simultaneously developing its neighbouring countries particularly Bangladesh and Myanmar. After the decision to link Agartala and Akhaura in Bangladesh by rail line this month, New Delhi and Dhaka are now working towards extending this link to Chittagong port so that Indian goods are exported to other destinations much faster and at a cheaper transportation costs. Another aspect of India’s support to development in Bangladesh will be the September 18 announcement of a 130-km kilometer high speed diesel pipeline from Numaligarh refinery unit in Silliguri to Parbatipur deport in Bangladesh.

Costing ?346 crore, the HSD pipeline will be constructed in 30 months and transport up to one million metric of diesel a year to Dhaka. Although India has been supplying HSD through rail rakes to Bangladesh since 2017, the pipeline will reduce transportation costs and make diesel cheaper in Bangladesh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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