HIGH COST SLOWS DOWN SINGAPORE-KUNMING RAIL LINK

From M. Saraswathi

BANGKOK, Feb 26 (Bernama) - High infrastructure costs have slowed down the
progress of the proposed construction of the 5,000 kilometre rail route by Asean
that will link Singapore to Kunming, the Asean Business Summit was told.

"The problem is that certain parts of the proposed missing rail link need to
be built and the cost of infrastructure is very high," Deputy Secretary General
of Asean for the Asean Economic Community (AEC), S. Pushpanathan said when asked
on the progress of the rail project.

As such, he said Asean was looking at infrastructure financing mechanism,
which was still at the conceptual stage.

"(Such initiatives) involves a lot of resources, procedures and systems," he
said during a question and answer session at the special session on AEC at the
2008 Asean Business and Investment Summit, which was held in conjunction
with the 14th Asean Summit here.

The private sector will not go into such projects unless the (financial)
risk was brought down, said Pushpanathan, adding that countries like Malaysia
has been in the forefront in terms of infrastructure financing.

The project was proposed at the 5th Asean summit in December 1995 and the
cost of the project was estimated at nearly US$23 billion.

However, Asean remains ambitious about completing the stretch by 2015.

Last year, it was reported that Cambodia received US$80 million funding for
its rail link to Thailand.

Cambodia would reportedly build a rail link to Thailand after it received
these funds from the Asian Development Bank and the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries.

Work on the 48km connection between Sisophan in Cambodia and Poipet near the
Thai border will be completed by 2010.

Besides the progress in funding of the Cambodian link, Malaysia also donated
used rail tracks worth more than US$2 million to Cambodia, which will help fill
in 48 kilometers of missing rails there.

-- BERNAMA