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Taking a leaf from China’s run to Europe, India is going to showcase its might in freight movement by running a trans-continental container train full of goods from Dhaka to Istanbul, covering a 6,000-km journey across five countries — Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.
Codenamed the ITI-DKD-Y corridor, the container train’s route is scheduled as Dhaka-Kolkata-Delhi-Islamabad-Tehran-Istanbul. Eventually, Yangon will also be connected to Dhaka. The missing Tamu-Kalay link in Myanmar is still to be built.
Indian Railways has called South Asian railway heads involved in the project to work out the nitty-gritty. While Pakistan allows freight trains and passenger trains from Delhi to Lahore via Attari, it has historically cited security reasons to not allow movement of containers on this route. For the demonstration, Indian officials said, it will not be a problem as it is a one-off run.
What energized the project is that a long missing link of 150 km in Zahedan, in the Baluchestan province of Iran, has now been established, connecting the country to the Pakistan Railway network on the border. So the Trans-Asian Railway Southern Corridor, as it is formally named, under the aegis of the UNESCAP, is good to go all the way to Turkey after certain operational exchange of notes and coordination between the nations concerned, which India is anchoring this month.
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