Straight Talk | IMEEC: PM Modi, Meloni And The Corridor The World Needs Right Now

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

The Iran crisis has ended the era of treating the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor as a decade-long project that bureaucracies can manage at their own pace

Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Rome on May 19 as the last stop on a five-nation Europe sweep, and the timing could not have been more loaded. The Strait of Hormuz has been shut since February 28. Energy markets are still reeling. Supply chains that multinationals spent decades building are being torn up and rerouted in real time. In that context, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC)—born at the New Delhi G20 in September 2023 amid considerable self-congratulation—has quietly transformed from a long-horizon infrastructure dream into something far more pressing.

What PM Modi and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will want to settle in Rome is simple: does the political will exist to push this mega project forward, or does it remain a corridor in name only?

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The original idea was genuinely ambitious. IMEEC envisions a connected web of rail and sea routes—an eastern leg running from India to the Gulf, a northern leg running from the Gulf up to Europe— stitching together two of the world’s great economic regions with something more resilient than a single chokepoint. India, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the European Union signed the founding MoU in New Delhi in September 2023. The stated goals were practical: cut transit times, reduce Suez dependence, build supply chains that could survive regional........

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