Ghost city’ Nay Pyi Taw is Myanmar’s showpiece at ASEAN

Myanmar is the rotating chair of ASEAN this year for the first time after joining the group in July 1997. The security cordon around the capital is so tight that about 20 per cent of Myanmar Police Force is now deployed in ensuring security in Nay Pyi Taw. The authorities have already designated Myanmar International Convention Centre-MICC1 and the State’s guest houses, the venues of the summit, as limited zones in Nay Pyi Taw.

In terms of sheer planning and execution of a Greenfield project, Myanmar’s capital Nay Pyi Taw would put any Indian city to shame. Ridiculed sometimes as the ‘ghost capital’, the capital city has a short history, having been founded on a malaria-infested shrubland, 3 kilometres west of the country’s logging town and sugarcane refinery center of Pyinmana, and approximately 320 kilometres north of the previous capital of Yangon.

Construction started in 2002 and the administrative capital was officially moved to the militarised

greenfield site on November 6, 2005. Nay Pyi Taw is generally translated as “royal capital”or the “seat of the king”, the name literally means “royal city of the sun” in Burmese.

The city is organised into a number of zones. The residential areas are segregated and organized, with apartments allotted according to rank and marital status. The roofs of apartment buildings are color-coded by the jobs of their residents. But many of the city’s residents, however, live in slums on the outskirts.

Then there’s a military zone, where military officers live in a restricted zone away from regular government employees in a complex said to consist of tunnels and bunkers. There’s a military zone that

hosts the headquarters of Myanmar’s government ministries. Interestingly, all the ministry buildings are almost identical in appearance. Then there’s the hotel zone that has a sprinkling of villa-style hotels on the main trunk road that bisects the city.

The economy of Myanmar is officially open for businesses and investors from abroad, a message that President U Thein Sein and his administration is increasingly eager to sell. The opening up of Myanmar to business has been followed up by a slew of high-octane announcements from global investors- Japan’s Nissan and Suzuki Motor plan to set up factories to manufacture cars, US car major Ford has opened a dealership and Coca-Cola already has a local bottling plant.

The Chinese are already active investors in Myanmar’s core sector projects. But, on the whole, the foreign investor community is said to be waiting and watching for clear indications of greater political certainty and improvement in infrastructure before placing their bets, and money, on the newly opened up economy. But concerns linger.

Myanmar’s government, comprising mostly of former generals, has refused to amend the country’s constitution to allow opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to run in elections scheduled for next year.

In Myanmar, till a couple of years back, there used to be just one major mobile phone operators – the state-owned Myanmar Posts & Telegraph (MPT). Due to advantage of having started early, the MPT has the largest geographical network reach, but its services are quite on the lines of India’s state-owned service providers. In recent months, though, the opening up of the country’s telecom market have seen
billions of dollars in foreign investment, leading to analysts predicting that Myanmar could soon turn into the hottest telecom destination with the world’s fastest-ever deployment of mobile services.

Ooredoo, a Qatar-based wireless carrier, has been granted an operating license later last year. Norway’s Telenor Group, one of the world’s biggest mobile companies, has also been granted a telecommunications license in the country. Like in India, increased competition is expected to help foster an improvement in quality of services and help push call rates down.