The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : India, China will seek new trade links, routes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 08, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

India, China will seek new trade links, routes

Special Correspondent

"Trade with China has outstripped business with U.S."

CHENNAI: India and China will seek new trade links and routes because bilateral trade is growing, according to Mohan Guruswamy, chairman, Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi.

The trade between India and China has surpassed the India-U.S. trade, but this is a temporary phase that will last only for a few years.

Speaking on `Some implications of the growth of India, China and ASEAN' at a seminar, organised here on Thursday, by the Centre for Security Analysis, Chennai (CSA) and the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF), New Delhi, he said India and China would grow faster than the ASEAN and that the India-China economic engagement would grow much faster than the India-ASEAN ties.

This would necessitate a new trade route. Though the possibility of a land route through Leh was being explored, sea would be remain the dominant route.

Once the Sethusamudram canal was commissioned, there would be a slight reduction in the time taken for the movement of cargo from the Indian west coast to China. The Straits of Malacca remained a bottleneck.

Lot of dynamism

Cautioning against getting carried away by the hype over the current phase of growth, he said there was a lot of dynamism in the India-China-ASEAN region, but it had to be remembered that India, China and most of the ASEAN region comprised poor societies.

Millions remained jobless despite the recent booms. In the case of the ASEAN, there were huge disparities in development among countries.

Faizal Bin Yahya, of National University of Singapore, Singapore, welcomed India's engagement with the ASEAN and said India could play a role in reducing the gap between the ASEAN and CMLV States (Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam). The CMLV States were a contested region between India and China. China had a larger influence among them.

V.R. Raghavan, president, CSA, said India had a lot to learn from the Southeast Asian region.

The two-day seminar dealt with a wide variety of issues that affected the region.

Volker Bauer, resident representative, HSF, outlined the work of the foundation and said energy security was the prime concern of India and of most developing and developed countries.

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