Sittwe port in Rakhine State, the terminus of a trade route from Mizoram in India to The Myanmar coast was officially inaugurated on 9 May.

The port, on the Rakhine State coast at the mouth of the Kaladan River, was inaugurated by the Indian Union Minister for Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Sarbananda Sonowal, and the Myanmar junta Deputy Prime Minister and Union Minister for Transport & Communications.

Sittwe Port has been developed as part of the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project (KMTTP). It was officially started in 2008 and it was funded with a $500 million USD investment by the Indian government. The inauguration had been delayed from January this year.

The port is part of a new route from Mizoram to Sittwe. Cargo can come from overseas to Sittwe deepwater port and from there continue up the Kaladan RIver to Paletwa in Myanmar’s Chin State, before being transferred to trucks and going by road to Mizoram.

As part of the transport project, the Kaladan River was dredged so that bigger ships could navigate it and the road from Paletwa to Myeikwa, a Myanmar town on the border with India, was upgraded.

The new route is particularly useful to India because it will provide an alternative sea route to move goods from western India to its landlocked northeastern states.

Previously the only way to move goods between those areas was through the Siliguri Corridor, also known as the Chicken’s Neck, a narrow strip of Indian land between Nepal and Bangladesh. This led to significant delays and increased costs.

Now goods going between the northeast of India and the rest of India also have the option of going via Myanmar and then by sea.

At the inauguration, Sarbananda Sonowal said: “Mizoram and other States will greatly benefit from this project.”

After the inauguration, the first ship to use the Sittwe port was the Indian cargo vessel, the ITT Lion which bought 1,000 tons of Portland cement across the Bay of Bengal from Kolkata. After unloading the cement it loaded up with 1,000 tons of green gram from Myanmar and returned to Kolkata.

The Indian embassy in Myanmar said that Sittwe port would improve trade, employment, tourism and shipping between the two countries and improve the lives of people from both countries.

The Indian government has officially engaged with the Myanmar junta since the February 2021 coup and has exported weapons to the junta as recently as this year.