SAARC and BIMSTEC Explained: India’s Regional Groupings

When people talk about India’s neighbourhood diplomacy, two acronyms come up again and again: SAARC and BIMSTEC. SAARC, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, was India’s first great regional experiment, born in Dhaka in 1985 with the hope of making South Asia as connected as Southeast Asia. BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, is a younger and smaller grouping that has quietly moved to the centre of New Delhi’s regional thinking.

This explainer sets out what each organisation is, who belongs to it, what it has achieved and where it has struggled. It also looks at the question that interests students of foreign policy the most: why has India shifted its weight from one grouping to the other, and what does that shift say about the way the region is changing? The aim is to stay factual and neutral, using stable, well-established information.

Quick Facts: SAARC and BIMSTEC at a Glance

What Is SAARC? Origins and Purpose

The idea of a South Asian regional body is usually traced to the late 1970s, when Bangladesh’s President Ziaur Rahman promoted the concept of cooperation among the countries of the subcontinent. After several rounds of consultations among foreign secretaries and foreign ministers, the first summit was held in Dhaka, and SAARC was formally launched on 8 December 1985 with the adoption of its Charter.

The seven founding members

SAARC began with seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Afghanistan joined in 2007, bringing the total to eight. Several countries and organisations, including China, Japan, the European Union and the United States, have been given observer status over the years, which shows how widely the region’s economic potential was recognised.

Aims and principles

The Charter set out goals that were deliberately broad: promoting the welfare of the people of South Asia, accelerating economic growth, social progress and cultural development, strengthening collective self-reliance, and cooperating with other developing countries and international organisations. Two features of the Charter would later prove decisive. First, decisions at all levels are taken on the basis of unanimity. Second, bilateral and contentious issues are excluded from the deliberations of the association. The founders included these safeguards to make smaller states comfortable and to keep disputes from derailing cooperation, but, as later sections explain, they also limited what SAARC could do.

SAARC’s Institutions and Achievements

For a body that has spent years without a summit, SAARC leaves behind a surprisingly dense institutional footprint. The Secretariat in Kathmandu coordinates its work, and the heads of government meet at summits, which were meant to be held roughly every year or two. Below the summit sit councils of ministers, a standing committee of foreign secretaries and technical committees.

Some of the better-known SAARC mechanisms and agreements include:

• SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area): signed in 2004 and in force from 2006, it aimed at gradually reducing tariffs on trade among member states, with special provisions for the least developed members.
• SAARC Development Fund (SDF): a financing body for social, economic and infrastructure projects, with its secretariat in Thimphu, Bhutan.
• South Asian University: an international university in New Delhi, established by the members to build regional academic links.
• SAARC Food Bank: a reserve mechanism designed to help members during food shortages and emergencies.
• SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme: intended to ease travel for specified categories of people such as officials, judges and journalists.
• Regional centres: specialised centres on subjects such as disaster management, agriculture, meteorology and culture were set up in different member countries.
• Conventions: agreements on issues such as suppression of terrorism, narcotic drugs and trafficking in women and children.

These achievements matter, but their practical impact has often been modest. Tariff concessions under SAFTA were weakened by long sensitive lists of goods that were excluded, and many agreements were signed but only partly implemented.

Why SAARC Stalled: The India-Pakistan Factor

Almost every analysis of SAARC arrives at the same explanation. The organisation works on consensus, and its two largest members have a long-running and often tense relationship. Because any one member can hold up a decision, a strained India-Pakistan relationship tends to freeze the whole machinery, even in areas where other members want to move ahead.

The unanimity problem

Unanimity gives every member a voice, but it also gives every member a veto. Proposals on connectivity, transit and trade facilitation have repeatedly needed the agreement of all eight countries. When one country is reluctant, the rest are left with the choice of waiting or going around the association.

An asymmetric region

India accounts for the majority of the region’s land area, population and economic output, and it shares borders with most other members. Smaller neighbours have at times worried about domination, while India has pointed to the difficulty of pursuing deeper integration when transit and trade routes through one neighbour are not available. This structural imbalance makes it harder to design a bargain that everyone sees as fair.

Low intra-regional trade

The results are visible in trade. Estimates commonly put trade among South Asian countries at only a small share of their total trade, far below the share seen among ASEAN members. High tariffs, non-tariff barriers, weak transport links and cumbersome border procedures all contribute, which is why South Asia is regularly described as one of the least integrated regions in the world.

The 2016 Islamabad Summit and the Long Pause

The 18th SAARC summit was held in Kathmandu in 2014, and the 19th was scheduled to take place in Islamabad in November 2016. In September 2016, following the attack on an Indian Army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir, India announced that it would not participate. Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also conveyed that the environment was not suitable for attending, and the summit was postponed.

No SAARC summit has been held since. The association has not been formally dissolved, and its Secretariat in Kathmandu and several of its centres continue to exist, but its top-level political engine has effectively been idle. Some meetings and technical exchanges have continued at lower levels, and a video conference of leaders in March 2020 on the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a regional emergency fund, showed that the format can still be revived in a crisis.

Even so, the 2016 episode is widely treated as a turning point. It demonstrated that SAARC’s cooperation depended on a baseline of political calm among its members, and that when this was missing, the association had no way of working around the problem. That experience pushed policymakers to look for other platforms.

What Is BIMSTEC? A Bridge Across the Bay of Bengal

BIMSTEC is a regional organisation that brings together countries around the Bay of Bengal. Its story began on 6 June 1997, when Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand signed the Bangkok Declaration to form BIST-EC. Myanmar joined later in 1997, turning the acronym into BIMST-EC. Nepal and Bhutan were admitted in 2004, after which the group took its present name, BIMSTEC.

Seven members, two sub-regions

The membership consists of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Five are in South Asia and two, Myanmar and Thailand, are in Southeast Asia. Together they cover a large share of the world’s population, well over a fifth by common estimates, and a significant combined economy. Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives are not members, and BIMSTEC makes no claim to replace SAARC.

Headquarters and geography

The permanent Secretariat is in Dhaka and began operating in the mid-2010s. The Bay of Bengal itself is the glue: it connects India’s eastern and north-eastern states with Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand, and provides sea routes that are vital for trade and energy supplies. For landlocked members such as Nepal and Bhutan, the bay offers access to ports and thus to the wider world.

BIMSTEC’s Focus Areas

BIMSTEC began with a handful of priority sectors, such as trade, technology, energy, transport, tourism and fisheries. Over time this list expanded to cover around fourteen areas, and the members later regrouped them into broader clusters, with different member states taking responsibility as lead countries for particular fields. The agenda can be summarised under five headings.

• Connectivity: roads, ports, coastal shipping, inland waterways and links between power grids. A Master Plan for Transport Connectivity has been adopted to guide this work.
• Trade and investment: a framework agreement for a BIMSTEC free trade area was signed in 2004, although negotiations on the detailed agreements remain unfinished.
• Security: cooperation on counter-terrorism, transnational crime, cyber security and maritime safety. A convention on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters was signed in 2018.
• Energy: hydropower, electricity trade and grid interconnection, which draw on Nepal’s and Bhutan’s hydropower potential and on the demand of their neighbours.
• Disaster management: the Bay of Bengal is exposed to cyclones, floods and storm surges, so joint preparedness, early warning and training are natural areas for cooperation.

Concrete projects that connect to the BIMSTEC vision include the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project between India and Myanmar and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, although both are bilateral or trilateral rather than formal BIMSTEC projects.

The BIMSTEC Charter of 2022

For its first quarter-century, BIMSTEC functioned without a charter. That changed at the fifth summit, hosted virtually by Sri Lanka in Colombo on 30 March 2022, when the leaders adopted the BIMSTEC Charter. The document gave the organisation a formal legal personality and set out its purposes, principles, organs and decision-making processes.

What the Charter does

• Establishes BIMSTEC as an international organisation with a clearly defined structure, including the summit as the highest policy-making body, ministerial meetings and the Secretariat.
• Records principles such as sovereign equality, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs and peaceful settlement of disputes.
• Confirms Dhaka as the home of the Secretariat and provides for rotating chairmanship among members.
• Creates a basis for membership rules and for future agreements.

Why it matters

A charter does not by itself make an organisation effective, but it removes uncertainty about how it works. For a grouping that had been criticised for lacking an institutional core, adoption of the Charter was seen as a sign that members were prepared to make BIMSTEC more serious. Later summits, including the sixth in Bangkok in 2025, have continued the effort to build on this foundation.

SAARC vs BIMSTEC: A Comparison

Why India Pivoted from SAARC to BIMSTEC

India has never formally abandoned SAARC, and it remains a member. What has changed is where New Delhi invests its diplomatic energy. Several reasons are usually cited by analysts.

Bypassing the logjam

BIMSTEC does not include Pakistan, so decisions are not held up by the India-Pakistan relationship. This lets India pursue practical cooperation on infrastructure, energy and security with six neighbours without waiting for consensus that may never come.

Linking Neighbourhood First and Act East

BIMSTEC sits at the intersection of two flagship ideas: Neighbourhood First, which prioritises relations with immediate neighbours, and Act East, India’s engagement with Southeast and East Asia. India’s north-eastern states, which share borders with Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal, are expected to become gateways rather than remote frontiers, and BIMSTEC offers a framework that supports this idea.

Gateway to ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific

With Myanmar and Thailand as members, BIMSTEC offers a land and sea bridge to ASEAN. It also fits the wider Indo-Pacific outlook, in which the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean are seen as a connected strategic space.

Signals through invitations

The shift was visible in diplomatic gestures. In 2014 India invited SAARC leaders to the swearing-in ceremony of its government. In 2016, it invited BIMSTEC leaders to an outreach summit alongside the BRICS meeting in Goa, and in 2019 it chose to invite BIMSTEC leaders to the swearing-in ceremony instead.

Neighbourhood First and Other Regional Frameworks

BIMSTEC is only one piece of India’s regional architecture. The idea that India should give priority to good relations with its neighbours goes back to the Gujral Doctrine of the 1990s, which emphasised non-reciprocal goodwill towards smaller neighbours, and it has been expressed more recently as the Neighbourhood First policy. The 1991 Look East Policy later evolved into Act East.

Other frameworks that India uses alongside SAARC and BIMSTEC include:

• BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal): a sub-regional initiative on road transport and connectivity, which produced a motor vehicles agreement in 2015.
• Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA): a wider forum of Indian Ocean littoral states.
• Mekong-Ganga Cooperation: links India with several mainland Southeast Asian countries.
• SASEC: a programme supported by the Asian Development Bank for South Asian sub-regional economic cooperation.
• Bilateral and trilateral arrangements: such as security conclaves and connectivity projects among Indian Ocean neighbours.

The ASEAN comparison

ASEAN, founded in 1967 with five members in Bangkok, is often held up as a model. It started with modest ambitions, built habits of consultation and gradually deepened economic ties, ending up as a bloc of over ten members. It also relies on consensus, but it has avoided paralysis by not having a single dominant member and by treating security and economic cooperation as mutually supportive. South Asia lacks a similar balance, which explains why a SAARC-type model has been harder to replicate.

Challenges Facing Both Groupings

Neither SAARC nor BIMSTEC is free from difficulties, and it would be wrong to see BIMSTEC as a ready-made replacement.

For SAARC

• The political deadlock between two members, which freezes the summit process.
• The unanimity rule and the exclusion of bilateral issues, which limit its room for manoeuvre.
• Limited trade liberalisation under SAFTA and weak physical and transit connectivity.

For BIMSTEC

• Slow progress: after more than twenty-five years, key agreements, including the free trade pact, are still incomplete.
• Capacity: the Secretariat is small, and funds and staff are limited compared with the long list of sectors.
• Connectivity gaps: poor roads, ports and border-crossing infrastructure make it hard to turn cooperation on paper into trade in practice.
• Political change: internal developments in members such as Myanmar and Bangladesh can affect the pace of engagement.
• Focus: a very wide agenda may spread resources too thin, and many experts suggest prioritising a few areas such as connectivity and maritime security.

The common lesson is that regional groupings succeed when members invest in them steadily, build institutions and deliver visible, practical benefits to ordinary people.

Conclusion

SAARC and BIMSTEC reflect two different ways of imagining India’s neighbourhood. SAARC was founded on the idea of a South Asian community, but its progress has been held back by political rivalry and a consensus rule that allows any member to block action. BIMSTEC offers a smaller, more flexible platform around the Bay of Bengal that ties South Asia to Southeast Asia and fits India’s Neighbourhood First, Act East and Indo-Pacific priorities.

India’s pivot does not mean the end of SAARC, which still exists and could in principle be revived if political conditions change. It does mean that for now, much of the energy in regional cooperation has moved to the Bay of Bengal. Whether BIMSTEC succeeds will depend on how well its members turn its Charter and plans into roads, ports, power lines and trade. Last updated: 1 October 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does SAARC stand for and when was it founded?

SAARC stands for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. It was established on 8 December 1985 at the first summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to promote economic and social cooperation among South Asian countries. Its Secretariat is based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Who are the members of SAARC and BIMSTEC?

SAARC has eight members: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. BIMSTEC has seven: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Pakistan is not a member of BIMSTEC, while Myanmar and Thailand are not members of SAARC.

Why has SAARC not held a summit since 2014?

The 19th summit, due in Islamabad in 2016, was postponed after India and several other members declined to attend following the Uri attack. Since SAARC works on consensus and the India-Pakistan relationship has remained strained, the summit process has not resumed. The organisation, however, has not been formally dissolved.

What is BIMSTEC and why is it important for India?

BIMSTEC is a regional organisation of seven countries around the Bay of Bengal, founded in 1997, with its Secretariat in Dhaka. It matters to India because it links South Asia with Southeast Asia, connects the Neighbourhood First and Act East policies, and allows cooperation without the constraints seen in SAARC.

Has India left SAARC?

No. India remains a member of SAARC and has not withdrawn. It has, however, placed greater emphasis on BIMSTEC and other frameworks such as BBIN, because these allow quicker progress on connectivity, security and trade.

What is the BIMSTEC Charter?

The BIMSTEC Charter was adopted at the fifth summit, held virtually from Colombo on 30 March 2022. It gives the organisation a formal legal identity and sets out its objectives, principles and institutional structure, including the role of the Secretariat in Dhaka.

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