Road to Everest

While New Delhi has woken up to Beijing’s modernisation of road networks in Tibet, we have a long way to in matching the imagination of the Chinese establishment.

This week Beijing announced plans to convert a 100 km path from the foot of Mount Everest to a base camp at a little over 17,000 feet into a paved highway. Mt Everest, which straddles the border between Nepal and Tibet, rises up to 29,035 feet.

This new highway, to be ready in about four months, would be part of the torch relay for the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. This is said to be longest relay in the history of Olympics and covers 136,000 km route across five continents, and scale a part of the Mount Everest. Beijing expects the new road to be a big tourist draw.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore