Naypyidaw: A Dusty Work in Progress
covering burma and southeast asia
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Naypyidaw: A Dusty Work in Progress


By Clive Parker OCTOBER, 2006 - VOLUME 14 NO.10


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(Page 3 of 7)

Similarly, when Pakistan moved its capital from Karachi to Islamabad in 1967, the last civil servants were not relocated until well into the 1980s.

 

Asia World Company has been contracted by the government for another six years, which means that Naypyidaw will remain under construction until at least 2012. And for the 80,000 workers enlisted to build the new city, conditions have reportedly been poor from the start.

 

The International Labour Organization received reports that at least 2,800 people from the surrounding area were forced to build camps for three army battalions and an air force battalion to secure Pyinmana ahead of construction. “In addition to labor, each village had to provide roofing and construction materials and transport for the project,” an ILO report from March 2005 said. The government has denied the allegations.

 

The ILO has not received any verifiable evidence of forced labor since then, and says  it is reluctant to draw attention to labor complaints from Naypyidaw for fear that the government might punish complainants for “spreading false information,” as it has in numerous other cases. The government agreed to a moratorium o­n such prosecutions in July.

 

The lowest-paid laborers in Naypyidaw make 1,500 kyat (US $1.10) a day. Some have travelled from distant parts of Burma to participate in what o­ne worker called his “duty.” Men, women and children work in the numerous brick factories that span Naypyidaw, scooping wet clay from the ground with their bare hands and shaping the building blocks of their new capital.

 

Many of these laborers are required to work seven days a week, from dawn until nightfall. o­n the main roads leading into Naypyidaw, they can be seen at all hours pressing partly-set tarmac into potholes by hand.

 

Reporting o­n such developments in Naypyidaw can be dangerous, as two Burmese photojournalists discovered in March. Each was sentenced to three years in jail for taking photographs—strictly forbidden since the relocation was announced.

 

The burden of a capital relocation o­n a country’s human resources is predictably heavy—perhaps more so under a military dictatorship—but the financial burden can also be staggering, says Ed Schatz, a political scientist from the University of Toronto who specializes in the subject of capital relocation.

 

“First, tremendous financial resources must be available for the move.



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