AirAsia Eyes Northeast

Tony Fernandes however did not specify routes

By Aneesh Phadnis 

Tony Fernandes

Mumbai, Jul 7 : AirAsia seems to have sensed an opportunity in the underserved northeast region, which has only two direct flights to Mumbai and Bangalore.  At a company event on Friday, Chief Executive Tony Fernandes said the airline would focus on the Northeast destinations but did not specify routes.

AirAsia has launched services on the Bangalore-Chennai and Bangalore-Goa routes.

According to schedule filed with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), there are only two direct flights linking Guwahati with Mumbai and Bangalore. Both are operated by IndiGo, India's largest domestic airline. Most of the other flights to West and South India from this region have one or more stops.

Guwahati also has direct flights to Delhi and one or two stop flights to Ahmedabad, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Jaipur. None of the other northeastern airports has direct connectivity with Delhi, Mumbai or airports in South India.

The route dispersal guidelines, which mandate capacity allocation by airlines in underserved areas, were revised in March. Under the new norms, airlines are required to deploy six per cent of total capacity on routes in the northeast, Kashmir, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. However, this guideline was not implemented due to objections from airlines. Under the earlier norms, Bagdogra in West Bengal was clubbed with northeast airports, requiring mandatory deployment of capacity.

An executive of a private airline said, "There is a demand on routes to Imphal and Agartala but these can be better served with one-stop flights. This reduces the risk of flight not getting enough occupancy.''

"There is a demand on Northeast routes but it is a price-sensitive market. Traffic is dominated by students and inhabitants from Northeast settled in other parts of country. Route feasibility depends on cost structure. Besides, fuel prices in Northeast are high,'' another executive said.

Tour companies have, however, welcomed AirAsia's announcement to explore Northeast market. "There is a VFR (visiting friends and relatives) and leisure travel traffic to Northeast. There are constraints like quality hotels at present but these will ease once travel demand grows. Airlines, which fly twin class (economy and business) configuration, might have a feasibility issue but I do not see a problem for low-cost airlines offering single class service,'' said Rakshit Desai, managing director of FCM Travel Solutions.

North East cities linked by airlines:

GoAir - Guwahati

Jet Airways - Agartala, Aizawl, Dibrugarh, Guwahati, Imphal, Jorhat and Silchar,

IndiGo - Agartala, Dibrugarh, Guwahati and Imphal

Alliance Air - Guwahati, Imphal, Shillong, Silchar

Air India - Agartala, Aizawl, Dibrugarh, Dimapur, Guwahati, Imphal, Silchar

SpiceJet - Agartala, Guwahati

Only two direct flights to Mumbai and Bangalore. Flights to other cities in South India with one or two stops

Flights on some of the routes to North East are not daily

Source - Directorate General of Civil Aviation

Manipur: How To Kill A Highway

The highway and its hinterland have more sinister applications than micro-politics and emotions run amok

By Sudeep Chakravarti

Malaise de Manipur, a worrying condition of sub-continental drift, has a way of infecting things. It weakens India’s security in the North-East and attendant geopolitical imperatives, including the so-called Look East Policy. And it continues to undermine Manipur’s ethnic equity and economic development—including the promise of hydrocarbons and minerals.

Take a tiny example: Asian Highway 1. On 28 June, I attempted to travel on it from Imphal, the capital of Manipur, to Moreh, a border town 110km away at the south-eastern edge of the state and a designated hub for India’s enhanced transport, trade and tourism play with Myanmar and beyond. I didn’t get far. On that day Thadou Students’ Association, a group of the area’s dominant Kuki tribes called a 24-hour blockade of the highway in Manipur’s Chandel district, where Moreh is located. They were protesting the allegedly callous behaviour of paramilitary personnel towards six persons injured in a road accident in mid-June. An “active member” of the association had been among the injured.

A day later a so-called joint action committee of citizens called a 48-hour blockade of the same highway to protest the murder of a resident of Nungourok, a nearby village, by as yet unidentified perpetrators. And so, for 72 hours India’s key overland route to Myanmar, the conduit for thriving cross-border trade—both legitimate and grey—that feeds much of north-eastern India, remained blockaded. The police, Chandel district administration and Manipur government were either unable or unwilling to calm nerves and redress grievances.

This two-lane, poorly maintained strip is also National Highway 102 (until recently National Highway 39). Asian Highway 1 incorporates it as part of a planned seamless link between Myanmar and several other nations of South-East Asia to West Asia and Europe through north-eastern India, Bangladesh and “Mainland” India.

The highway and its hinterland have more sinister applications than micro-politics and emotions run amok. This is also a narcotic artery. In February this year, a colonel of the Indian Army and five others, including a soldier and locals, were arrested on charges of ferrying pseudoephedrine tablets of various brands valued at Rs.15-20 crore, from Imphal to Moreh. The colonel’s car sported defence ministry plates and a beacon. Two other cars in the convoy had “Army” pasted on the windshields. Police chased them down when the officer breezed past a check post flashing his credentials. One of those arrested was an Imphal-based security official with an airline.

Shipping of such drugs as couriered consignments isn’t uncommon. Pseudoephedrine, used to relieve common cold and allergies, travels from India to Myanmar. It is used to create methamphetamine stimulants, which then return to India. The interdiction of a colonel is a rarity in this regional trade that security observers and activists in the area of drug rehabilitation place at billions of rupees a year. They point to the involvement of at least a dozen rebel groups of all ethnic persuasions—Naga, Meitei, Kuki, Zomi—active in Manipur; and that of the political, bureaucratic and security establishments.

All feed off this economy of conflict. To the north and south of the Imphal-Moreh artery lie narcotic havens cradled in hilly terrain. In Ukhrul district to the north, a stronghold of Naga rebels, poppy and cannabis are grown. Poppy is a favoured crop to the south in Chandel and Churachandpur to the south-west, which like Ukhrul border Myanmar; here Kuki and Meitei rebels have sanctuary. Cannabis is largely absorbed into north-eastern India. Poppy sap is cooked into a base to manufacture heroin. It is then transported by couriers using steep mountain trails into Myanmar.

It returns as heroin, distributed using various channels, including Asian Highway 1. Here security forces live cheek by jowl with militant groups that are either actively belligerent or have suspended hostilities as part of negotiations with the government. Either way, there’s coexistence. Drugs are openly sold in Imphal.

A short walk from my hotel in the city’s North AOC area, on a stretch of Asian Highway 1 christened Indo-Myanmar road, everything from “SP” (a code for Spasmo-Proxyvon, a painkiller) to marijuana, and “No. 4” (a category of heroin) to “WY” (a mood enhancer that expands as “World is Yours”), are available. It’s near the barracks of police, paramilitaries and the army.

A modest jog away is the chief minister’s residence and the state’s administrative hub, the secretariat. I’ll be here for a while. The Thadou Students’ Association has called for a 72-hour blockade of the highway from 5 July.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s forthcoming book is Clear-Hold-Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India. His previous books include Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.

Welcome to the Traffic Capital of the World

What I learned from the crippling gridlock in Dhaka, Bangladesh

By Michael Hobbes

I am in a tiny steel cage attached to a motorcycle, stuttering through traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In the last ten minutes, we have moved forward maybe three feet, inch by inch, the driver wrenching the wheel left and right, wriggling deeper into the wedge between a delivery truck and a rickshaw in front of us.

Up ahead, the traffic is jammed so close together that pedestrians are climbing over pickup trucks and through empty rickshaws to cross the street. Two rows to my left is an ambulance, blue light spinning uselessly. The driver is in the road, smoking a cigarette, standing on his tiptoes, looking ahead for where the traffic clears. Every once in awhile he reaches into the open door to honk his horn.

This is what the streets here look like from seven o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. If you’re rich, you experience it from the back seat of a car, the percussion muffled behind glass. If you’re poor, you’re in a rickshaw, breathing in the exhaust.

Me, I’m sitting in the back of a CNG, a three-wheeled motorcycle shaped like a slice of pie and covered with scrap metal. I’m here working on a human rights project related (inevitably) to the garment factories, but whenever I ask people in Dhaka what their main priority is, what they think international organizations should really be working on, they tell me about the traffic.

It might not be as sexy as building schools or curing malaria, but alleviating traffic congestion is one of the defining development challenges of our time. Half the world’s population already lives in cities, and the United Nations estimates that proportion will rise to nearly 70 percent by 2050.

Of the 23 “megacities” identified by the United Nations, only five are in high-income countries, places with the infrastructure (physical, political, economic, you name it) to deal with the increasing queues of cars snarling up the roads. Mexico City adds two cars to its roads for every person it adds to its population. In India, the ratio is three to one.

ADVERTISEMENT

Dhaka, the world’s densest and fastest-growing city by some measures, and its twentieth-largest by population, is a case study in how this problem got so bad—and why it’s so difficult to solve.

Like many developing-country capitals, Dhaka’s infrastructure doesn’t match the scale of its population. Just 7 percent of the city is covered by roads, compared with around 25 percent of Paris and Vienna and 40 percent of Washington and Chicago, according to one analysis. Dhaka also suffers from the absence of a deliberate road network, feeder streets leading to arterials leading to highways.

There are 650 major intersections, but only 60 traffic lights, many of which don’t work. That means the already stretched-thin police force isn’t enforcing driving or parking rules—they’re in the intersections, directing traffic.

Illustration by Sophia Foster-Dimino

The cost of Dhaka’s traffic congestion is estimated at $3.8 billion a year, and that’s just the delays and air pollution, not the less-tangible losses in quality of life and social capital. Paradoxically, the poor infrastructure is one of the reasons why the city is growing so fast. Without roads or trains to whisk them to the suburbs, Dhaka residents have no choice but to crowd into the middle, set up slums between high-rises, and walk to work.

“See that?” asked one of my Bangladeshi colleagues, pointing to a quilt of corrugated roofs. “That’s where all of our domestic workers live.”

Then there are the users of the roads. Besides pedestrians, the narrow lanes are shared by bicycles, rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, CNGs, buses, and cars. All these modes take up a different amount of space and have different top speeds. It’s like a version of Tetris where none of the shapes fit.

Most people you talk to in Bangladesh blame the traffic jams on the rickshaws. There are too many of them, they say, and they drive so slowly, slaloming around the potholes, that they trap the cars, buses, and CNGs behind them. The government is under pressure to designate some lanes as car-only, to build wider roads and overpasses, to take the slow traffic out from in front of the fast.

And this brings us to the third reason why the traffic problem is so difficult to solve: politics. All of these fixes sound easy and obvious, but they come at a cost. One and a half million people drive rickshaws for a living, plus another few hundred thousand own and repair them. Government efforts to get people out of rickshaws and into buses and trains are going to attract huge opposition.

Even increasing bus capacity is more complicated than it sounds. A 2009 World Bank analysis found 60 separate bus companies in Dhaka, each with their own ever-changing routes and schedules. Passengers are charged according to how far they’re traveling, and have to haggle with the driver over the fare. Since the bus companies compete with each other, the drivers have every incentive to drive aggressively and take more passengers than the buses can hold.

What’s more, the public transport isn’t, technically, all that public. Many of the bus companies are owned or linked to political parties or powerful trade unions. Government efforts to unify or regularize the system would amount to a hostile takeover of all of these small companies.

The obvious solution, or the one proposed by international experts anyway, is to separate the rickshaws from the cars from the CNGs, give each of them lanes and lights according to their top speed, and, crucially, make car drivers pay the cost of taking up more space on the roads.

But that, politically speaking, is about as plausible as suggesting that everyone fly to work on the back of a giant eagle. Car owners are a small part of the population, but a highly influential and politically necessary one. Having a car—and a driver, of course—is a major perk of being a government official or business executive.

What is development for, after all, if you still have to ride to work in a swaying, shuddering rickshaw, amid the fumes and the horns and the heat? Every year, Dhaka adds an extra 37,000 cars to its already beleaguered roads. Many Dhaka residents would, understandably, see this as a success, a sign of Bangladesh’s brighter, middle-income future.

Even the cops make it harder to fix the problem. That World Bank analysis reported that only 50 percent of bus drivers and less than half of CNG drivers had proper licenses. Cops take bribes to overlook fake, expired, or nonexistent paperwork. Updating and regularizing the licensing system and enforcing traffic laws, in practice, means cutting off an income stream for an underpaid, important constituency.

Take a second to think about all this from a Bangladeshi politician’s point of view. Any attempt to solve the traffic mess means pissing off the poor, the middle class, and the rich all at once. It’s basically President Obama versus the health care system, only instead of patients, doctors, and insurance companies, it’s rickshaw drivers, cops, and bus companies. As Americans know well by now, entrenched institutions don’t just dissolve when you point out how inefficient they are.

But here’s where the metaphor breaks down. The government of Bangladesh has an option that Obama never did, one last way to have their roads and drive on them, too: international donors. In 2012, the government announced a $2.75 billion plan to build a metro rail system. Eighty-five percent of the project is being financed as a loan—at 0.01 percent interest—by the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

If you’re a Bangladeshi politician, this is a great deal. Not only do you avoid taking on these inconveniently entrenched interest groups, but you also get a transportation system for poisha on the taka. A $255 million bus rapid-transit line from the airport, thanks to loans from the French government and the Asian Development Bank, will cost Bangladesh just $45 million to build.

For residents of Dhaka, however, it’s less of a bargain. These projects will take years, maybe decades, to come to fruition (there’s already infighting about how the bus lines should be built) and the construction will only make Dhaka’s traffic worse until they do. In the meantime, cheaper solutions to Dhaka’s traffic jams—enforce the law, reduce cars, improve bus service—cost too much, in political terms, to consider.

Whenever I asked my Bangladeshi colleagues how long it would take to get somewhere, they always gave two answers: “Without traffic, maybe fifteen minutes. But with traffic? Who knows?”

Maybe that’s the way to think about how the world’s megacities will solve the problem of traffic congestion. Without hard political choices to make? Maybe a few years. But with them? Who knows?

Michael Hobbes is a human rights consultant in Berlin. He has written for Slate, Pacific Standard, and The Billfold. Read more of his work here.

Major NGOs in Mizoram Not To Support Protest March

Aizawl, Jul 3 : Major NGOs in Mizoram today decided not to support a procession proposed by the Presbyterian Church in protest against the state government's intention to relax the prohibition law.

The NGOs - central committee of the Young Mizo Association (YMA), the Mizo Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl (MHIP) or Mizo women's federation and the Mizoram Upa Pawl (MUP) or Mizo elders' association - expressed their inability to participate if the Mizoram Synod of the Presbyterian Church organised a protest rally.

General Secretary of the YMA central committee Vanlalruata said the opinions of the NGOs were expressed in a meeting convened by the Mizoram Synod this evening.

The NGOs, while vowing to continue their fight against drugs and alcohol said they could not support the church's protest march as their members belonged to different church denominations.

Senior Executive Secretary of the Mizoram Synod Rev Lalzuithanga had earlier said the church would organise mass prayer on Sunday night at every local church.

He said posters would be displayed in Aizawl city protesting the proposal of the state government and also send letter to the Chief Minister and Excise and Narcotics Minister not to introduce the proposed bill to relax the prohibition.

The church also proposed to take out a procession if the major NGOs agreed to support the church on the issue.

Meanwhile, the proposed Mizoram Liquor (Prohibition and Control) Bill, 2014 was submitted to the state Assembly for introduction and deliberations in the Monsoon session commencing from July 8.

The proposed bill was already endorsed by the state cabinet and the ruling Congress party and was set to be introduced and deliberated in the Assembly on July 10.

The Mizoram Liquor Total Prohibition Act, 1995 has been in force in the state for the past 17 years and many felt it has done more harm than good to the society while the state government lost huge revenue during the period.

Presbyterian Church Opposes Relaxation Of Prohibition

Aizawl, Jul 3 : Mizoram Synod of the Presbyterian Church of India, the largest church in the state, today protested the recent proposal of the state government to relax prohibition in the state.

Posters would be displayed in Aizawl city protesting the proposal of the state government and letters would be sent to the chief minister and excise and narcotics minister not to introduce the proposed bill to relax prohibition, senior Executive Secretary of Mizoram Synod Rev. Lalzuithanga said.

The church also proposed to take out a procession if major non-governmental organisations - the Young Mizo Association (YMA), the Mizo Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl (MHIP) or women's federation and Mizoram Upa Pawl (MUP) or elders' association agreed to support the church in the issue.

The proposed "Mizoram Liquor (Prohibition and Control) Bill, 2014" has been endorsed by the ruling Congress Legislature Party and the Council of Ministers and is set to be introduced and deliberated in the state assembly on July 10.

Mizoram Wants Rajnath's Help To Tesolve Border Row with Assam

Aizawl, Jul 3 : Mizoram Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla has sought union Home Minister Rajnath Singh's intervention to resolve the Assam-Mizoram boundary dispute, an official said here on Wednesday.

"The Chief Minister met the Union Home Minister in New Delhi on Saturday and requested him to intervene in the long pending boundary dispute with Assam," said an official of the Mizoram government speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Rajnath Singh, as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during an election campaign before the 2013 Assembly polls in Mizoram, had said the border dispute would be resolved if the BJP came to power at the Centre.

Occasionally, the border disputes between northern Mizoram and southern Assam have flared-up among the people of the two northeastern states, forcing the authorities to intervene.

Southern Assam's Karimganj, Cachar and Hailakandi districts share their border with Mizoram's Kolosib district -- which was one of the districts of Assam till 1973 when Mizoram became a union territory.

The official said: "The Chief Minister discussed with the central home minister about the reimbursement of security related expenditure.

"Mizoram Police have been spending huge money to deal with the militant outfits who are operating from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar and adjoining northeastern states are occasionally doing violent activities in Mizoram."

On the repatriation of tribal refugees from Tripura to Mizoram, the chief minister told Rajnath Singh that a section of refugee leaders have been creating problem opposing the repatriation process.

"However, Mizoram has taken steps for the repatriation of the refugees and as on June 23, 1,237 tribal families have returned to Mizoram from Tripura," the official said.

The official cited Rajnath Singh as telling Home Ministry officials to do whatever is possible at the earliest.

Northeast People Assault Likened To Contempt Of Court

New Delhi, Jul 3 : A contempt plea was on Wednesday mentioned before the Delhi high court seeking action against two lawyers and others for allegedly abusing and manhandling some persons from the northeast inside the Tis Hazari district court complex.

The persons from the northeast, who had gone to Tis Hazari courts on May 23 for recording of the statement of a molestation victim from the region, were allegedly abused and assaulted by some lawyers inside the courtroom of a magistrate.

"Contempt proceedings be initiated against the contemnors as the victims have been denied access to the justice delivery system," senior advocate Indira Jaising, appearing for the northeast residents, told a bench headed by Chief Justice G Rohini.

The court, however, said that it would hear the contempt plea, which was filed on Wednesday with the registry, when it is brought on record and fixed the matter for hearing on July 16. The contempt plea has been filed in a pending PIL which was instituted after the court had taken suo motu cognizance of media reports about the death of Arunachal Pradesh student Nido Tania and had issued a slew of directions on the issue of safety and security of northeast citizens.

The fresh plea has sought initiation of criminal contempt against two Delhi-based lawyers who had allegedly abused and assaulted persons from northeast inside the Tis Hazari Court premises on May 23.

Business As Usual: Poachers Prey On Frogs in Manipur

By Sobhapati Samom

Imphal, Jul 3 : Unlike other poachers, frog hunters in Manipur venture out in groups in auto-rickshaws looking for good sites. They look for paddy fields in the rainy season. They modify torch lights using bamboo tubes. When they light their torches on the water, the eyes of frogs glitter and then they chase and catch them.

A hunter can harvest about 50 frogs a night and three to four groups can harvest about 40,000 frogs a month if they are lucky enough. They then hand over their catch to a collector who buys them at Rs. 5 to Rs. 7 per frog depending on the size of their catch.

The collectors then take it to the master collector who buys it at higher rates and sends them to the markets in Manipur's hill districts and neighbouring states where frogs are a delicacy.

Hunting of frogs is a serious threat to the ecosystem. Feeding on pests, frogs are natural pest controller.

As the frog poachers hunt at night and ferry their catch through inter-state transport services early in the morning their business is never out in the public.

This is how the frog hunters work in Manipur every day and night.

This came to light following a disclosure by a group of frog traders who were arrested in the state during a raid conducted by Peoples For Animal (PFA) Thoubal accompanied by a police team from Imphal West police station.

The raid was conducted on a few locations along Dingku road in Imphal around 4am on Tuesday, according to a press release issued by PFA Thoubal.

"We succeeded in apprehending four female hunters who were dealing in frogs," said the PFA.
"A total of 523 frogs of Indian Bullfrog species which are listed in schedule 4 of Wildlife Protection Act, including some dead, were rescued from them."

The arrested frog hunters and traders have been identified as Ningombam Dashu of Khongjom Tekcham, Naorem Memcha of KhongjomTekcham, Thabitha Ningshen of Kamjong and Jenni Shimrah of Sangshak both presently staying at Khuman Lampak in Imphal.

They have been compounded a sum of Rs. 2000 each and the frogs were released back to the paddy fields with the permission of Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Central Division on Tuesday.

The step was taken in view of the mushrooming of frog trading as thousands of them are being caught and eaten while thousands others are feared to be exported to neighboring states.

Manipur houses number of exotic flora and fauna but instead of conserving them, people always look for easy money by exploiting them.

Hunting of frogs is a serious threat to the ecosystem. Feeding on pests, frogs are natural pest controller and many wild birds and animals eat them too. Their over-hunting could thus lead to a imbalance in the nature.

"This is one of reason why the hill districts of Manipur where frogs are caught and eaten experienced more vector born disease cases as these were spread by fly, mosquito and other insects," the PFA said.