Establishing the connection

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: often have to wait for up to five days to get clearance. A part of the reason is some nations don’t allow foreign trucks to operate in their territories. The conditions of overland routes are also poor, and there is no rail connectivity, partly due to the lack of uniformity in track gauges mong countries.

The South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) have just paid lip service to trade facilitation. This is in sharp contrast to the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) initiative in South-East Asia.

SAFTA has no chance to succeed given the lack of trust between India and Pakistan. South Asian integration is too important to be made hostage to a dispute only among two of its eight members. One unique opportunity is to put some teeth to BIMSTEC to transform it as a trade facilitation center for its members. The BIMSTEC can easily be extended to include Maldives, and simultaneously a joint protocol between Afghanistan, Iran, India and Sri Lanka can create an integrated transport agreement linking Afghanistan and the rest of Central and South Asia via the Persian Gulf port of Chahbahar. BIMSTEC can then be further extended to link with South-East Asia through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore, and reorient the focus of this grouping as a nodal agreement on trade facilitation. In order to succeed, it should have specific time-bound targets, which have to be mandatory for all member states.

A regional integration can succeed only with connectivity. It is high time to leverage this new interest in trade and transport facilitation to push for an aggressive reform agenda connecting South Asia with South-East Asia through a reoriented BIMSTEC with its main focus on connectivity. This should be the focus of the forthcoming summit in Delhi in November.