China border has become more alive and India is enhancing frontier infrastructure: Jaishankar

India's border with China has become "more alive" and requires a much greater commitment of Indian troops on a sustained basis, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on Saturday, listing New Delhi's policy push to strengthen infrastructure along the frontier. He said India has bolstered its military capabilities along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) since the deadly clashes in Eastern Ladakh's Galwan Valley in 2020.

Speaking at an interactive session at a leadership summit in New Delhi, he pointed to the growing frequency of announcements from the border region. A new tunnel built here, a new bridge there, another airfield commissioned - such news now arrives with greater and greater frequency, he said, adding that past work allowed large numbers of troops to be deployed and continuing work will maintain those numbers.

His remarks came amid ongoing efforts by New Delhi and Beijing to normalise relations that came under severe strain during the more than four-year border face-off in Eastern Ladakh. Ties began to be repaired after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Russian city of Kazan in October 2024, once the face-off had ended. Those talks covered a range of issues, including reducing the trade deficit, tackling challenges such as terrorism and ensuring fair trade on multilateral platforms.

Border infrastructure was neglected until a decade ago

Jaishankar said there is much data and evidence to show that border infrastructure was really neglected until about a decade ago. People spoke about it and drew up plans, but anyone who goes on the ground and sees the year-by-year record of roads, tunnelling and positioning - certainly anyone associated with the armed forces in that sector - knows the truth, he said. It is really in the last decade that such attention, resources and policy push have been given, and India's capability to deploy troops on that border has seen a very marked improvement.

Responding to a question on the economic asymmetry between the two countries, he recalled that when Rajiv Gandhi visited China in 1988 the Indian and Chinese economies were about the same size. China made a huge push towards modernisation and industrialisation in the 1980s while India simply missed the bus, he said, adding that the reforms of the 1990s were not carried through sector by sector. Catch-up cannot be achieved by following the same track, he said - India has to leap-frog, build its particular strengths, and pick the issues where it has the ability to make a big change.