Asian Highway debacle

The issue at hand for the government is the route the highway will take through Bangladesh. Bangladesh has not succeeded in convincing the relevant parties at the eleventh hour to amend the route of the highway that has been painstakingly negotiated.

However, once it was clear that we would not get the route the government wanted, there were two options.

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Option one would be to sign up for the highway and thereby retain voting rights, in the hope that we could persuade the others to include the southern route as part of the network at a later date, or at least to ensure that we would have access to the network.

However, option two that the government has chosen sounds catastrophic. The worst case scenario is that Bangladesh never joins, thus permanently leaving us on the outside of the network.

On the other hand, if we do sign up at any time in the future, we will now no longer have voting rights, and will have to comply with decisions made earlier. Thus the chances of the southern route ever being included in the network are now virtually zero.

In addition, India, Myanmar and Thailand are building a tripartite road that bypasses Bangladesh, which they may well lobby to have included in the network, leaving us permanently out in the cold.

The push for the southern route has been myopic from the first, but at the very least we should have signed the agreement to keep our options open and our plan viable. Refusing to sign can only be considered an appalling blunder.