The recently concluded fourth summit of the seven nation grouping, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation in Nepal has set an affirmative tune towards a “peaceful, prosperous and sustainable Bay of Bengal region” through connectivity, trade and people-to-people contact. India, the dominant member nation, has pitched for enhancing trans-regional connectivity not only for economic cooperation, but also for combating security challenges, in which the host nation Nepal eventually declined to cooperate.

Sub-regional cooperation as an approach has been increasingly essential from the Asian powers to address both security issues and engage with economic potentials. Bimstec, a unique sub-regional forum has become visibly proactive since 2016 with a push from India, apparently after the Uri attack in Jammu and Kashmir. It was not only to “isolate” Pakistan but also to create a “complement” to an ineffective South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation.

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The journey of this forum began two decades ago in 1997 as the Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand Economic Cooperation, which ultimately transformed into Bimstec within the next seven years, with the inclusion of Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan. Given the geographical locations of these seven nations, Bimstec strategically attempts to lay down a contiguous regional connect both through littoral and mountainous nations to counter-balance China’s strong regional anchor.

In this geographical contour of Bimstec, India aims to engage its North-eastern states as pivotal transit spaces and corridors for connecting member nations and facilitating joint activities more constructively. This has been India’s major focus since the early 1990s with its Look East Policy, which unfortunately has remained ineffective not only due to insufficient infrastructure within the North-east and its internal conflicts, but also due to India’s regional diplomatic failure to get Bangladesh and Myanmar to cooperate in handling the insurgency issue.

Such challenges restrained stability and constructive engagements of Bimstec members for the last two decades. In the recent past, as India intensified its sub-regional engagements through its Act East and Neighbourhood First policies, the political economy of sub-regional cooperation at both bilateral and multilateral levels has become visible and affirmative. In this context, strengthening connections with East and South-east Asia is a bold step to make the Northeast a “natural gateway” to the untapped potential of the region.

All eight states of the North-east together share about 1,880 km borders with four Bimstec nations — Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar —and therefore, are paramount for various trans-regional routes and mobility. The other two — Thailand and Sri Lanka — can be connected both through surface and maritime roads.

The impending Trilateral Highway to connect India, Myanmar and Thailand through Manipur and the Kaladan Multimodal Transport Transit to connect India’s Mizoram and Myanmar through the Bay of Bengal can well complete the loop of connectivity and stimulate trade and capital circulation under the Bimstec’s Free Trade Area Framework Agreement. That is freshly under negotiation along with the Custom Cooperation Agreement and Motor Vehicle Agreement after the latest summit in Nepal.

India’s existing total trade volume with Bimstec is still much lower compared to the Association for South-east Asian Nations. Union ministry of trade and commerce data shows that in the year 2017-18, India’s total trade share with the Bimstec region was only 4.54 per cent as against 10.57 per cent with the Asean region. But it was better than with the Saarc nations, which stood at 3.10 per cent.

To fill the gap and make the engagement more productive, routes and trades amongst Bimstec members are necessarily important. It is expected to ensure not only economic prosperity but goodwill and stability among member nations, which are mutually dependent. Over the last 20 years, Bimstec has identified 14 priority areas for engagement, where India has proposed two more —Blue Economy and Mountain Economy — through which it expects to engage its North-eastern region more constructively.

It is therefore likely that new economic projects will be initiated to harness and integrate both the ocean and mountain economies of this subregion, where the North-east can create a segment with its enormous resource base, economic potential and geographical location.

With India’s clear stand on the North-east to integrate with a larger market, various intra-regional connectivity projects are already under progress since 2014. Trade and mobility even within the inner circle of the North-east, Bangladesh and Myanmar was impossible until recently, leaving aside the outer circle that Bimstec provides with its Free Trade Area Framework Agreement.

A 2017 report by Niti Aayog shows that though the North-east has 98 per cent of international border with its neighbouring nations, their economic potential has remained unexplored and consequently about 95 per cent of India’s total exports to the neighbouring countries are being routed through other areas outside the North-east. This is now changing with India’s proactive approach to creating both connectivity and market infrastructure in the North-east.

In this shifting dynamics, as various neighbouring market forces are now keen for tapping a closer network of mobility, business, financial and human capital, the North-east is no longer a “periphery”, and its meaningful economic integration can become a reality.

Certain endogenous plantation sectors like tea can be expanded in this Sub-Himalayan region by aiming for an agglomeration of tea growing areas of Assam and all other newly tea-growing states like Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Sikkim, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh along with the neighbouring areas like Sylhet in Bangladesh, the Terai region of Nepal and the North Bengal and Darjeeling districts. This sector plays a crucial role in the economy of this subregion to provide livelihood to a large number of people along with “historical, cultural and ecological uniqueness”.

With cross-border agglomeration, this can be seen as a Sub- Himalayan “tea region”, which can potentially be spread over nine lakh hectares of geographical area. This can be connected for larger circulation through Myanmar to reach the South-east Asian market and compete with China, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Such endogenous and bottom-up approaches can effectively make Bimstec more region-centric, where isolated spaces like the Northeast, whose tea industry is otherwise globally known, can create a niche and be a key player in ensuring sustained supply-chain, skills, and also connectedness by “thinning” the barriers of borders with routes and transits to become a “natural gateway” to foster complementarities, equity and efficiency.

Such policy towards complementarities with a bottom-up approach can also help towards the idea of new regionalism. According to scholars Dent and Huang (2002), the five driving forces for new regionalism are economic complementarities, geographical proximity, political and economic framework, infrastructural linkage and market accessibility, which the Bimstec member nations can aim to attend for closer integration and deeper relations.

The Bimstec sub-region is home to 1.5 billion people, constituting 21 per cent of global population with a combined 2.5 trillion dollar economy. At the same time it is also a home to several million people who live in the darkness of poverty, often being victims of nature’s fury and impoverishment due to lack of human development.

The challenge faced by Bimstec member nations is to transform such narratives through constructive cooperation and make the Bay of Bengal region meaningful for its people, while fostering strategic goals to capitalise on the benefits of new regionalism and integration.

The writer is on the faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi