THAT seems to be the case of the Gwadar Seaport—-standing there almost in tranquil glory lacking the required infrastructural facilities to make it functional and sans any significant operations because it is yet get an operator to manage it.

The first phase of the port has cost an amount of $250 million; with China contributing $200 million and the rest coming from Pakistan. The facility was to have been inaugurated in April 2005. It is now almost sixteen months since, during which two more dates were announced and passed with nothing happening. Now the talk is, it will be set rolling in December this year.

But then there are two aspects of the project which need to be completed before the port could become operational and functional. To complete the first one you need to appoint an operator experienced in handling sea ports with proven relevant technical and managerial abilities and also having sound financial capacity. And to make the port functional you need to set up down stream infrastructure like roads, railroads, bridges, airports, ensure availability of adequate supplies of utilities like water, power and gas, and provide the needed skilled and unskilled manpower to operate these infrastructure including hospitals, educational institutions and security.

Sometime back the government invited bids from internally recognized port operators for the purpose of awarding the contract for operating the Gwadar seaport and received six bids. Ostensibly the government appears to be still engaged in the exercise of secrutinising these bids. On the face of it the most likely candidate to win the contract appears to be Dubai World Port. Yes, the same one which the Americans said they cannot trust their ports with when DWP was all but set to take over half a dozen of them after having bought the British company which had been operating these ports.

When the DWP CEO and Chairman of Nakheel group that owns DWP visited Pakistan, he announced ambitious plans to invest in Pakistan. In fact, he used the occasion to announce that his group’s bank Dubai Islamic Bank has launched a $5 billion private equity fund to participate in “strategic transactions on a global basis.”

However, the DWP has sought rights which if accepted “would completely strip off the government of all rights and would give absolute powers and authority to DWP for taking all future decisions with regard to all sensitive and strategic issues directly related to the revenue, tariff development and operational matters.” That is perhaps the reason why DWP, a company owned by the Dubai government, and decisively the best among the six bidders is said to have lost some crucial points in the internal evaluation process.

DWP is a unit of NAKHEEL group of United Arab Emirates. Its chairman Sultan Amad Bin Sulayem personally led a seven-member delegation to Pakistan earlier this year to emphasise the importance attached by his group to secure the operational ownership of Gwadar sea port. The delegation also included CEO, Dubai port Mohammad Sharaf. of the remaining five bidders, two are Saudi and one each from Hong Kong, Singapore, Pakistan and China. The Chinese company is said to have remained out of the formal bidding but has given an informal pledge to contribute generously to the cost of second phase. And it has also said to have expressed willingness to bring in investors for setting up a refinery at Gwadar as well as to establish a large strategic oil reserve facility at the port plus a dry port at the Pakistan- Western China border.

Pakistan is said to be inclined to consider the Chinese company’s offer. But the geo-strategic implications of handing over such a strategically located sea port to China is said to have caused the Pakistani decision makers to take time out to consider in further detail all the pros and cons of the deal and its consequences for Pakistan which is a Non-Nato ally of the US and which also suffers a tension ridden relationship with neighboring India which in turn views China with a lot of suspicion.

While choosing the right operator for Gwadar port has become highly problematic, the official efforts to establish the needed downstream infrastructure facilities to make the port functional and also the campaign to get the private sector to contribute significantly to these efforts are said to have met with very little success.

The Gwadar seaport when it becomes operational and functional is expected to boost trade with landlocked Central Asian States and Afghanistan, promote trade and transport with Gulf States, encourage trans-shipment essentially of containerized cargo, facilitate western China to trade with the world more economically, give huge socio-economic lift to Balochistan province, encourage setting up of oil storage, refinery and petrochemical facilities and reduce pressure on the existing Qasim and Karachi ports.

But all these expected benefits have so far remained only in the files because there is nothing on the ground so far in and around Gwadar to facilitate such activities. A nearly 750 kilometer coastal road from Karachi to Jiwani near the Iranian border has been in operation for some time. A 200 kilometer branch road that would link the coastal road to the Indus Highway at Ratto-Dera is under construction by a consortium of Chinese and Pakistani companies, a five-star hotel has cropped up at the strategic hammer head of the Duader city and existing airport is being enlarged for big aircrafts Yes, the coastal road, which during the last rains had been partly washed away. But that is about all.

There are no internal roads and services and water, gas, power and communication services for the new township and the industrial zone are non-existent. There are no warehouses or cold storages in the area. No significant progress has been made so far in respect to development of commercial and residential areas and buildings, there are no labour related amenities for accommodating thousands of workers to be employed on a functional sea port.

In the meanwhile, swindlers from other parts of the country have zipped and zipped out of the town ripping off thousands and racking in millions by selling dreams through escalated prices of land that did not even belong to them. There is a law in this country under which it is mandatory to stop sale and purchase of land in areas which have been earmarked for development for at least six months before the start of development to until six months after the completion of the development work. This law was enacted clearly to protect the interests of the poor people of poor village ear marked for development from being swindled out of their possessions for a song by the unscrupulous. But this law was suspended in the case of Gwadar providing the room for the swindlers to make their play.

There is a genuine fear as well among the original dwellers of Gwadar that once the port starts functioning, outsiders would come in reducing them to the status of Red Indians in their own land and then pushing them into perpetual poverty by swindling them out of their landed possessions.

Also, there has been a demand from the nationalist Baloch to stop the incoming population from acquiring voting rights in Gwadar and the surrounding villages for at least 15 years. The JUI Member from Balochistan, Maulana Mohammad Khan Sherani who is opposed to the ideology of the nationalist Baloch population and who is said to be very close to President General Pervez Musharraf despite being in the opposition at the centre, believes that the government in Islamabad was violating a federal principle in the case of Gwadar port.

He said it was like an outsider entering into your home, setting up a factory in there and managing it. He said the Gwadar ‘factory’ belongs to Balochistan and therefore it should be treated as such and the province should be given its complete ownership.

Under the 1973 Constitution, operations of ports were a concurrent subject which was to be ultimately handed over to the provincial governments. While the provincial government of Balochistan has no reservations about the federal government’s decision to appoint an international operator for Gwadar port, it has made it known that it would be entitled to the revenues yielded by the port operations.

Critics, in the meanwhile have already started voicing doubts about the expected benefits accruing from trade with Central Asia Republics(CARs). They say you have to go through the entire length and breadth of two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, both as of which today are highly volatile, to enter the oil and mineral rich CARs. They said the developed Chah Bahar sea port of Iran is more easily and more conveniently accessible to CARs rather than Gwadar. Even Bader Abbas and Busher sea ports of Iran are said to be more economically accessible to the CARs.

But then, if China has already invested $200 million in the Gwadar facility and if one of its consortiums of companies is willing to contribute a hefty part of the $800 million required to construct the second phase of the port, then there must be some economic logic to the project besides the geo-strategic advantages Beijing is likely to enjoy in the Indian Ocean once it takes over the operations of Gwadar port

. China today is in the process of developing its landlocked western regions. And it is also perhaps looking for a location in the proximity of its western region for putting up a refinery as well as strategic oil reserve facility.

On the face it, Gwadar appears to be the ideal location for setting up these facilities. But then if Pakistan continues to drag its feet in the matter of putting up the needed infrastructural facilities in the port area and the required roads and railroads links to move goods to and fro from western Asia-Gwadar at an economical cost in time, then perhaps we would have lost a great economic opportunity as well as the existing facility constructed with a loan of $200 million to be repaid in the shape of services availed by China from a functional sea port.