Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-awaited visit to Bangladesh on 26-27 March, India has given a massive push to enhance infrastructure connectivity with the neighbouring country, as New Delhi plans to take Dhaka into its strategic embrace under the umbrella of Indo-Pacific cooperation.
Dhaka will be Modi’s first trip abroad since the Covid-19 lockdown. Earlier this week, Modi and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina virtually inaugurated the ‘Maitri Setu’, which will allow the landlocked Northeast easy access to the Chittagong Port of Bangladesh.
The 1.9-km bridge, built over the Feni River, will connect Tripura with Bangladesh. On the Indian side, it will connect with an integrated check post on the land border between Sabroom in India and Ramgarh in Bangladesh.
Apart from the Maitri Setu, or ‘Friendship Bridge’, India and Bangladesh are involved in a number of other initiatives that will prove to be the “projects of the future” when it comes to enhancing India’s ‘Neighbourhood Policy’ as well as ‘Look East Policy’, diplomatic sources told ThePrint.
These projects encompass water and shipping, railways, road and air links, all of which are aimed at taking the connectivity aspect to the “next level” and “assert larger influence” in the Bay of Bengal area, which is fast becoming the cornerstone of the Indo-Pacific strategy, the sources said.
While inaugurating the ‘Maitri Setu’, Modi said it is expected to “herald a new chapter” in India-Bangladesh ties, making Tripura the ‘Gateway of Northeast’, with the Chittagong Port located 80 km from the new integrated check post in Sabroom.
Added Hasina, “We are creating a new era in South Asia by providing connectivity to India. We are in a region which has remained conservative in opening up and where inter-regional trade is far below potential.”
Bangladesh has also allowed India to use its two most crucial ports — Chittagong and Mongla — for enhancing trade and people-to-people connectivity.
Connectivity projects that are high on the priority list are the Asian Highway Network routes (AH-1 and 2), which will be connecting India and Bangladesh at the Petrapole-Benapole, Fulbari-Banglabandha and Dawki-Tamabil points, and a new rail link between Akhaura (Bangladesh) and Agartala (India), among others.
“Robust infrastructure connectivity always has a strong strategic dimension to it because it is driven by economic cooperation and integration and thereby growth of an economy. Any kind of economic interdependence requires the existence of a basic infrastructure,” Constantino Xavier, Fellow at the think tank Centre for Social and Economic Progress, told ThePrint.
Xavier added, “There’s a huge demand in the region for export facilitation within the Indo-Pacific economies and so this bridge (Maitri Setu) is ultimately the ground zero for India’s Neighbourhood First Policy, Act East Policy and Indo-Pacific Policy.” (theprint)