BIMSTEC: Bay of Bengal Cooperation, Charter and India’s Pivot

BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, is the regional grouping that links five South Asian and two Southeast Asian states across the Bay of Bengal littoral. Founded in Bangkok on 6 June 1997 with the BIST-EC Declaration — the original Bangladesh-India-Sri Lanka-Thailand grouping — it expanded to include Myanmar (December 1997), Nepal and Bhutan (February 2004) and assumed its present form and name as a seven-member organisation. For nearly three decades it remained an under-institutionalised sub-regional grouping; it acquired legal personality only with the adoption of the BIMSTEC Charter at the 6th Summit in Bangkok in April 2024.

For India, BIMSTEC has become the principal vehicle of regional engagement after the paralysis of SAARC. It carries three structural advantages: it sits at the intersection of South Asia and Southeast Asia, it does not include Pakistan and is therefore not held hostage to the India-Pakistan deadlock that has frozen SAARC and India, and it links India’s Act East Policy and Neighbourhood First agenda in a single forum. BIMSTEC also dovetails with India’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy by anchoring the Bay of Bengal as a strategic space.

Origins and Expansion

The Bay of Bengal grouping was first floated in 1996 by Thailand, which was pursuing a Look West policy at the same time as India was launching Look East. The aim was to bridge the two regions across the bay. The Bangkok Declaration of 6 June 1997 founded BIST-EC. Myanmar joined six months later, turning it into BIMST-EC. Nepal became an observer in 1998 and a full member, alongside Bhutan, in 2004. The organisation was renamed the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation — BIMSTEC — at the first leaders’ summit in Bangkok in July 2004.

Member States and Geography

BIMSTEC has seven member states — Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It covers roughly 1.7 billion people, around 22 per cent of the world’s population, and a combined GDP estimated at well over USD 4 trillion. The Bay of Bengal, the largest bay in the world, sits at its core. Five of the seven members are littoral states; Bhutan and Nepal are landlocked.

Bangkok Declaration

The 1997 Bangkok Declaration set out the initial purposes — economic cooperation among the founding states across trade, investment, technology, transport, communications, energy, tourism and fisheries. The Declaration committed members to mutual benefit, equality and sovereignty.

Institutional Architecture

For more than two decades BIMSTEC operated without a binding constitutive treaty. A secretariat was established in Dhaka in 2014, headed by a Secretary-General drawn from member states on rotation. The institutional spine is the BIMSTEC Summit at the heads-of-state level, the Ministerial Meeting at the level of foreign ministers, the Senior Officials’ Meeting at the level of foreign secretaries, and the BIMSTEC Working Group.

The 2024 BIMSTEC Charter

The 6th BIMSTEC Summit was held in Bangkok on 4 April 2024 and adopted the BIMSTEC Charter — the most consequential institutional development in the organisation’s history. The Charter gives BIMSTEC formal international legal personality, recognises it as a regional organisation, codifies its objectives, principles, structure, decision-making rules and procedures, defines the powers of its organs and the role of the Secretariat, and provides a framework for engagement with external partners. The Charter entered into force in 2024 after ratification by all seven members. The Bangkok Summit also adopted the Bangkok Vision 2030 and a number of cooperation frameworks across the priority sectors.

Reorganised Sectors

At the 5th Summit in Colombo in March 2022, BIMSTEC reorganised its earlier 14 cooperation sectors into seven priority pillars, each with a lead country. The new structure is:

• Trade, investment and development — lead: Bangladesh
• Environment and climate change — lead: Bhutan
• Security, including counter-terrorism and transnational crime, disaster management and energy — lead: India
• Agriculture and food security — lead: Myanmar
• People-to-people contacts — lead: Nepal
• Science, technology and innovation, including health — lead: Sri Lanka
• Connectivity — lead: Thailand

The shift from 14 sub-sectors to seven pillars with clear lead countries was designed to reduce sprawl and make BIMSTEC more deliverable.

Key Initiatives

BIMSTEC has produced several substantive initiatives despite its long institutional drift.

BIMSTEC Free Trade Area

A BIMSTEC Free Trade Area Framework Agreement was signed in 2004, envisaging an FTA in goods, services and investment with three categories — fast-track, normal-track and sensitive lists — and a phased tariff-reduction schedule. Implementation has been slow, and the FTA in goods is yet to be operationalised in full. Negotiations on the constituent agreements have continued through the BIMSTEC Trade Negotiating Committee.

Master Plan for Transport Connectivity

The BIMSTEC Master Plan for Transport Connectivity was adopted at the 5th Summit in Colombo in 2022 and identifies projects to build road, rail, maritime and aviation links across the bay, including the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project.

Energy Centre and Grid Interconnection

The BIMSTEC Centre for Weather and Climate is based in Noida, India. A BIMSTEC Energy Centre has been established in Bengaluru, India, to coordinate energy cooperation. The Memorandum of Understanding for Establishment of the BIMSTEC Grid Interconnection was signed at the 4th Summit in Kathmandu in 2018, providing a framework for cross-border electricity trade.

Security Cooperation

India leads the security pillar. The BIMSTEC Convention on Cooperation in Combating International Terrorism, Transnational Organized Crime and Illicit Drug Trafficking, signed in 2009, came into force in 2021. Annual meetings of national security advisers have institutionalised security dialogue, and the first BIMSTEC military exercise (MILEX-18) was held in Pune, India, in 2018. A BIMSTEC Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters has also been negotiated, alongside cooperation on cyber-security and information-sharing among member states’ security agencies.

Disaster Management

The Bay of Bengal is one of the most disaster-prone basins in the world — exposed to cyclones, storm surges, tsunamis and floods. Disaster management has accordingly emerged as a practical area of BIMSTEC cooperation, with the first BIMSTEC Disaster Management Exercise (DMEx-2017) hosted by India and a series of follow-on exercises on flood response, urban firefighting and search-and-rescue. The exchange of early-warning information across the bay is being progressively standardised under the security pillar India leads.

People-to-People and Sectoral Centres

Beyond the high politics, BIMSTEC has built a thin but real layer of people-to-people cooperation — BIMSTEC Network of Policy Think Tanks, BIMSTEC Business Forum, BIMSTEC Network of Universities, and youth and sports exchanges. The reorganised people-to-people pillar under Nepal is intended to consolidate and scale these initiatives in line with the Bangkok Vision 2030.

BIMSTEC and SAARC: A Comparative View

The two organisations cover overlapping geographies but have different trajectories. SAARC has eight members including Pakistan and Afghanistan; BIMSTEC has seven, including Myanmar and Thailand but excluding Pakistan and Afghanistan. SAARC operates by consensus across all matters and has been frozen since 2016. BIMSTEC, following its 2022 reorganisation and 2024 Charter, has clearer sectoral pillars, lead countries and a binding constitutive instrument.

For India, the calculation is straightforward. BIMSTEC connects the eastern and southern neighbourhood, includes the two Southeast Asian neighbours most relevant to India’s connectivity ambitions, and offers a viable platform when the SAARC summit cycle is suspended. The October 2016 BIMSTEC outreach summit in Goa, hosted by India on the margins of the BRICS summit days after the cancellation of the SAARC summit in Islamabad, was the public signal of this pivot. The trajectory has since been one of steady upgrading, culminating in the 2024 Charter.

This pivot does not mean a wholesale abandonment of South Asian regionalism — the Secretariat in Kathmandu and the South Asian University continue to operate. But the diplomatic centre of gravity for India’s regional engagement has shifted east, toward the Bay of Bengal and the wider Indo-Pacific, reflected also in the Quad and in deliberations at the SCO Summit 2025 and on the WTO front.

BIMSTEC: Outlook

BIMSTEC’s task in the second half of the 2020s is implementation. The Charter has been adopted; what remains is to operationalise the Master Plan for Transport Connectivity, conclude the constituent agreements of the BIMSTEC FTA, scale up the energy grid framework, deliver on the seven sectoral pillars and absorb the political crisis in Myanmar without halting the organisation’s work. The 7th BIMSTEC Summit, to be hosted by Bangladesh, will be a test of post-Charter delivery.

For UPSC General Studies Paper II, BIMSTEC is now the more important institutional reference for India’s regional cooperation than SAARC, and a useful companion topic to neighbourhood policy, connectivity diplomacy and the Indo-Pacific.

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