Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)

• It is a regional organization comprising seven Member States lying in the littoral and adjacent areas of the Bay of Bengal constituting a contiguous regional unity.
• It came into being on 6 June 1997 through the Bangkok Declaration.
• It constitutes seven Member States: five deriving from South Asia, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and two from Southeast Asia, including Myanmar and Thailand.
• Initially, the economic bloc was formed with four Member States with the acronym ‘BIST-EC’ (Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand Economic Cooperation).
• Following the inclusion of Myanmar on 22 December 1997 during a special Ministerial Meeting in Bangkok, the Group was renamed ‘BIMST-EC’ (Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand Economic Cooperation).
• With the admission of Nepal and Bhutan at the 6th Ministerial Meeting (February 2004, Thailand), the name of the grouping was changed to ‘Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC).

Objective

• The objective of building such an alliance was to harness shared and accelerated growth through mutual cooperation in different areas of common interests by mitigating the onslaught of globalization and by utilizing regional resources and geographical advantages.
• Unlike many other regional groupings, BIMSTEC is a sector-driven cooperative organization. Starting with six sectors—including trade, technology, energy, transport, tourism, and fisheries—for sectoral cooperation in late 1997, it expanded to embrace nine more sectors—including agriculture, public health, poverty alleviation, counter-terrorism, environment, culture, people to people contact and climate change—in 2008.

Institutional Mechanisms

• BIMSTEC Summit – Highest policymaking body in the BIMSTEC process and is comprised of heads of state/government of member states.
• Ministerial Meeting – Second apex policy-making forum of BIMSTEC attended by the External/Foreign Ministers of Member States.
• Senior Officials’ Meeting – Represented by Senior Officials of Foreign Ministries of the Member States.
• BIMSTEC Working Group – Attended by Ambassadors of BIMSTEC Member Countries to Bangladesh or their representatives every month at the BIMSTEC Secretariat in Dhaka.
• Business Forum & Economic Forum – The two important forums to ensure active participation of the private sector.

This grouping means in number

The BIMSTEC region is home to around 1.5 billion people which make up for around 22% of the world’s population. The region has a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.8 trillion.

India’s interest in the grouping

• Bridge between South Asia and Southeast Asia: The two Southeast Asian countries in the grouping, Myanmar and Thailand, have a crucial place for India’s ambitious connectivity plans for the northeastern region. Myanmar is only a Southeast Asian country India has a land boundary with.
• Act East policy: An India-Myanmar-Thailand highway is one of the key projects that figures in a big way in the government’s Act East (earlier Look East) policy.
• Pakistan’s obstructive attitude at the SAARC: BIMSTEC more naturally lends itself to regional integration—physical connectivity as well as economic cooperation—than SAARC which is dominated by India and Pakistan and hamstrung by tensions between the two.
• Enhanced Connectivity: BIMSTEC has at last three major projects that, when finished, could transform the movement of goods and vehicles through the countries in the grouping.
  • One is the Kaladan Multimodal Project that seeks to link India and Myanmar.
  • Another is the Asian Trilateral Highway connecting India and Thailand through Myanmar.
  • Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal (BBIN) have signed a pact for the movement of goods and vehicles among them.

In News:

• India invited the leaders of BIMSTEC countries for Narendra Modi’s swearing-in as prime minister on May 30. This indicates a shift in the government’s neighborhood policy.
• India participated in the 17th Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) Ministerial Meeting. The meeting endorsed the BIMSTEC Master Plan for Transport Connectivity for adoption at the next BIMSTEC Summit, which will be held in Sri Lanka.
• India’s northeastern states form a key part of the master plan, with several road and river links passing through the region. It also called for the early adoption of the BIMSTEC Charter.