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BIMSTEC, Northeast India, and an Overlooked Pillar of the Act East Policy

India’s Act East Policy should be judged by its ability to change from articulating strategy to putting that strategy into practice in the Northeast, via BIMSETC.

Leaders of BIMSTEC member countries pose for a group photograph at the 6th Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, April 4, 2025.

It made headlines when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-point action plan at the 6th BIMSTEC Summit in Bangkok on April 4, 2025. 

Two memoranda of understanding signed on the sidelines of the summit – one between India’s Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (MDoNER) and Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another between India’s North Eastern Handicrafts Development Corporation (NEHDC) and the Creative Economy Agency of Thailand (CCAT) – drew far less attention. These were low-key pledges with a strong message: The Northeast is not only a highway between BIMSTEC nations, but a key to the region.

Policy-wise, Northeast India is still under-represented in India’s BIMSTEC engagement. The region’s development, as well as that of BIMSTEC as a viable strategic grouping, cannot be achieved without redressing this imbalance.

Trade among the BIMSTEC member countries has not increased significantly since the Bangkok Declaration of 1997. The share of intra-regional trade remains small, around 7 percent of total trade, despite the grouping comprising nearly 25 percent of the world’s population and $5.2 trillion in combined GDP. More than 20 years after the BIMSTEC Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was agreed in principle in 2004, it has not yet been implemented.

The missing link is a functional land-based connectivity spine – each route of which would necessarily pass through India’s Northeast region. The region has an international boundary with five countries, 4,500 km of border in total, with India’s sole land connectivity with Southeast Asia being the Moreh-Tamu crossing with Myanmar and Mizoram-Chin State border with Myanmar. Yet infrastructure projects to physical link India and Southeast Asia remain stalled.

The Trilateral Highway between India, Myanmar and Thailand is said to be 70 percent finished, but successive deadlines have been delayed and security concerns in Myanmar following the February 2021 coup have contributed to long delays. The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project to connect Kolkata with Mizoram through Sittwe Port is also yet to meet successive deadlines, with the much awaited Paletwa-Zorinpui road section stuck in the middle of the conflict in Rakhine State of Myanmar. These aren’t just engineering postponements but rather illustrate the strategic, and tumultuous, position of Northeast India.

The implementation of the “Look East” policy from 1991 – renamed the “Act East” policy in 2014 – has helped in enhancing the strategic profile of the Northeast region and has led to a boom in investments. Despite its almost 8 percent landmass share, the region is responsible for less than 3 percent of India’s GDP. Progress has been made in some areas, such as the Trans-Arunachal Highway, building up integrated check posts, and air connectivity via UDAN. However, the implementation architecture is fragmented, with infrastructure ministries making the roads, the Ministry of External Affairs making the diplomacy, and the Ministry for Development of North Eastern Region (MDoNER) managing the development funds, without sufficient coordination between them. This silo mentality is particularly strong in the case of trade facilitation. 

Land customs stations on the Myanmar border are only open a few hours a day, and process little of the cross-border trade that was originally intended in bilateral trade agreements. The Moreh-Tamu Integrated Check Post, in spite of being improved, transports considerably less goods than other posts from the western borders in India. The informal trade taking place at these borders is several times that of the formal trade, but it does not produce the revenues that formal trade does, nor does it instill the trust that formal trade does.

The Sixth BIMSTEC Summit in 2025 was a turning point – the BIMSTEC 2030 Vision was endorsed........

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