A Capital Error

Pyinmana is booming—but at what cost?

Once a rural backwater, Pyinmana is now a boom town, as Burma’s rulers shift their power center from Rangoon, some 320 km to the south. Visitors returning to Pyinmana after an absence of only a few years would scarcely recognize the city that has risen from a provincial town of 100,000 inhabitants, who once owed their livelihoods to logging and a sugarcane refinery.

Now new businesses—particularly construction companies and real estate firms—are shooting up like forest mushrooms in the rainy season.

“We are seeing more new faces and buildings in town,” said a Pyinmana gold shop owner. “But, I’m pleased that our town is becoming a capital and I’m hoping that our businesses will be prosperous,” she said.

Pyinmana’s central Myoma market is packed with shoppers, and new shops, minimarkets, hotels and guesthouses open for business every day, according to the local press. Many of the new hotels springing up to accommodate the new arrivals, their families and friends are privately-owned.

A Rangoon-based real estate agent recently told The Irrawaddy that property prices have increased as much as tenfold in one year.