Connecting India To ASEAN: Opportunities and Challenges in India’s Northeast

As ASEAN and India celebrated two decades of friendship late last year, there was much lively discussion on how to bring the two growing regions closer together. Of the many ideas that were deliberated, one of the more prominent and promising approaches proposed the leveraging of the continuous geography shared by the two regions, which naturally brings to the fore the importance of land connectivity and trade dimensions of the relationship While this approach is still fairly novel to the India-ASEAN dynamic, there has already been a concerted effort by both parties to build up infrastructural capacity. These initiatives include the Trilateral Highway Project as well as ASEAN’s own Master Plan on Connectivity to link the two regions through roads, railroads and multi-modal transportation systems that will facilitate greater trade and interaction among the people of the two regions. All these projects, if they come to fruition, will enable passage through the Northeast Region of India (NER) and Myanmar. Cognizant of the important role that Northeast India plays in the closer engagement and integration between India and Southeast Asia, the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore has embarked on a research initiative to better understand the NER in the context of relations between India and Southeast Asia.