What BIMSTEC is and how it works

What the charter asks of an applicant

Article 6 of the BIMSTEC Charter sets out the test for admission, and the first criterion is geographic: an applicant state has to satisfy the conditions of territorial contiguity to, or direct opening into, or primary dependence on the Bay of Bengal for trade and transport purposes, or any other criteria agreed in the ministerial meeting. The three conditions that follow are not geographic at all. The applicant agrees to abide by the charter, possesses the ability and willingness to carry out the obligations of membership, and its admission has to contribute to the unity and solidarity of the organisation. The summit approves the admission on the recommendation of the ministerial meeting, and the new member then deposits an instrument of accession with the secretariat.

The third limb of that first criterion is the one that matters here. Bhutan and Nepal have no coast, and the charter admits a state whose trade and transport depend on a sea it does not touch. Both lie in the catchment that reaches the Bay through the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.

The name stopped naming the members

The text signed at Bangkok on 6 June 1997 is the Declaration on the Establishment of the Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand Economic Cooperation, and the acronym BIST-EC spelled its signatories out letter by letter. Myanmar was admitted on 22 December 1997 and the acronym became BIMST-EC. When Bhutan and Nepal were admitted in February 2004 the initials would have had to move a third time. They did not: the first summit, at Bangkok on 31 July 2004, renamed the grouping the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, and the letters stayed while ceasing to stand for anybody in particular. Article 35 of the charter keeps the older date in place, and the sixth of June is observed as BIMSTEC Day.

Cooperation began in 1997 across six sectors: trade, technology, energy, transport, tourism and fisheries. Thirteen more were added from 2008. A reorganisation in 2021 gave every member state one sector to lead and to host the meetings of, and the allocation is the clearest statement of what the organisation is for: trade, investment and development to Bangladesh, environment and climate change to Bhutan, security to India, agriculture and food security to Myanmar, people-to-people contact to Nepal, science, technology and innovation to Sri Lanka, and connectivity to Thailand.

A free trade area with an expired timetable

The Framework Agreement on the BIMSTEC Free Trade Area was signed at Phuket on 8 February 2004 by six governments, one of them the Kingdom of Nepal, which has been a federal republic since 28 May 2008. Bangladesh had taken part in the negotiations without signing, and a protocol concluded at Bangkok on 25 June 2004 made it a party to the agreement and a founding member of it.

What the framework fixed was the calendar rather than the tariffs. Fast track reductions were to begin on 1 July 2006 and end on 30 June 2009 for India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, and on 30 June 2011 for Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and Nepal, with earlier closing dates for parties classed as least developed. The normal track was to run from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2012 and to 30 June 2017 on the same split. Every one of those dates has passed. The constituent agreements the timetable depended on, covering rules of origin, customs procedures and trade in services among others, were left to be negotiated and have not been concluded; the declaration of the sixth summit, at Bangkok on 4 April 2025, directs the trade negotiating committee and its working groups to finalise them without further delay.

The organisation acquired a legal existence in 2024

For its first seventeen years the grouping had no permanent address. A memorandum of association on establishing a permanent secretariat was done at Nay Pyi Taw on 4 March 2014, the secretariat opened in Dhaka later that year, and a headquarters agreement with Bangladesh was concluded there on 1 November 2015.

The charter itself was signed at Colombo on 30 March 2022, at a fifth summit held virtually. Article 25 provides that it enters into force on the thirtieth day following the deposit of the seventh instrument of ratification, and that day came on 20 May 2024, twenty-seven years after the Bangkok Declaration. Article 3 confers legal personality on BIMSTEC as an inter-governmental organisation, which it had not previously held. Article 14 appoints a secretary general of ambassadorial rank for a single non-renewable term of three years, nominated by a member state in alphabetical rotation.

Article 8 requires a summit every two years, hosted by the member holding the chairmanship, with all decisions taken by consensus. The record before the charter was longer intervals: summits at Bangkok in 2004, New Delhi in 2008, Nay Pyi Taw in 2014, Kathmandu in 2018, Colombo in 2022 and Bangkok in 2025, with a leaders' retreat at Goa on 16 October 2016 between the third and the fourth.

What is in force, and among whom

The Agreement on Maritime Transport Cooperation was signed at Bangkok on 3 April 2025 and takes effect only among the states that ratify it, on the deposit of a fourth instrument. Bhutan, India and Thailand deposited theirs first, Myanmar deposited the fourth on 13 May 2026, and the agreement entered into force between those four. A landlocked member ratifying a maritime transport agreement before three of the coastal ones is the charter's admission criterion working as written.

Connectivity has its own plan: the Master Plan for Transport Connectivity was adopted alongside the charter at Colombo on 30 March 2022, and the 2025 declaration records progress on the India, Myanmar and Thailand Trilateral Highway and urges the conclusion of a motor vehicles agreement that is still under negotiation.

Every member belongs to other groupings that overlap this one, among them SAARC, ASEAN and the Indian Ocean Rim Association, and the charter addresses the overlap directly. Article 2 provides that cooperation within BIMSTEC will be complementary to, and not a substitute for, bilateral, sub-regional, regional or multilateral cooperation involving the member states.