ADB again offers funding for ML-1

Amid delays in financing arrangements with China for the $10 billion Karachi-Peshawar railway line (Main Line-1), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has re-emerged as a funding contender for the mega project. Planning Secretary Syed Zafar Ali Shah told a group of journalists on Wednesday that the ADB had recently shown interest in financing the project. “As of now, we are still pursuing a part of the project with China,” he said, agreeing that it was a big challenge. The Manila-based multilateral had earlier been elbowed out of the project on the insistence of China, which wanted to execute the project single-handedly as part of the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The two governments, however, could not finalise the financing agreement for the project for almost six years, and the 1,872-kilometer railway line project, considered Pakistan’s logistic backbone, went through cost escalations and CPEC itself ran into snags amid changing political environment. As the project’s infrastructure deteriorated further with negligible maintenance and last year’s massive floods, the new government attempted to revive Main Line-1 in phases, starting with a $3.7bn first phase, mostly in Sindh.