Abstract
The Indian Government's ‘Look-East' foreign policy initiative of 1990s and renewed as Act-East in 2016, with countries bordering with the North-Eastern States of India, is a platform to cultivate and strengthen socio-economic and political ties by establishing strategic relationships with the Southeast Asian economies through bi-lateral and multilateral trade, which has been neglected since 1947. The aim of the Act-East policy is to build cultural, commerce, connectivity, and capacity building via trade, tourism, tradition, talent, and technology transfer between North-Eastern India and the Asian neighbours. This chapter critically evaluates measures taken by the Indian Government under this policy to enhance business and trade opportunities with Southeast Asian countries for peace, achieving sustainable development goals, and economic progress.
TopBackground
The North-Eastern region of India for decades has remained isolated and underdeveloped since independence, due to successive central governments not having a concrete economic and infrastructure development and security strategy. Hence, it has been cut off from the mainstream Indian economy and is geographically connected by a narrow Siliguri corridor, and land-locked, giving rise to separatist insurgency, illegal migration, supply chain disruptions, and border conflict (Rahmati, Ali, & Kamraju, 2020). There have been old cultural and trade ties between India and South-East Asia for centuries and more so from the British colonial times, when the Indians under the colonial rule as slaves helped British, colonise Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, and Fiji.
In the 21st century, India has emerged as a major nuclear economic power and fifth largest economy in terms of GDP (purchasing power parity) in the world, with second largest population and market following China. The Indian Government’s foreign policy initiative of the 1990s ‘Look East Policy’ (LEP) is to transform the economy by forming economic trade agreements and linkages with countries bordering with the eight North-Eastern states of India. The LEP has been a platform to establish, cultivate, transform, and strengthen socio-economic, trade, tourism, cultural, political and security ties, to form strategic relationships with the ASEAN economies through bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade agreements, which has been neglected since 1962 Indo-China war (Das & Thomas, 2016; Haokip, 2015; Naidu, 2013; Ziipao, 2018).
In 1990’s, after the Indian financial and economic crisis, the ‘New Economic Policy Reform’ initiatives were introduced along with the Look East Policy, by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1991, to liberalise, privatise and open the economy for foreign investment and trade. The main aim was to provide opportunities for developing the Eastern-States of India and establishing trade, commerce and foreign relationships, economic and defence security cooperation, and engaging with South-Asian countries and the group of ASEAN neighbouring countries. Under the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 15 bilateral and multilateral agreements were signed between 2006 to 2011. Further, in 2006, India formed strategic cooperation with the large economies of Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa (BRICS) on various international platforms such as climate change and world trade organisation (Haokip, 2011, 2015; Ram, 2012; Rana, 2018).
The initial aim in the 1990’s of ‘Look East Policy’ introduced at the end of cold-war, was to engage diplomatically at foreign policy level and cooperate with Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries on economic bilateral relationship, strategic institutional partnerships and play a balancing role with emerging China’s encouraging trade and economic development policy, maritime power and influence in the ASEAN region (Banlaoi, 2003; Bajpaee, 2017; Das & Thomas, 2016; Downie, 2015; Goldberg, 2019; Lee, 2015; Nguyen, 2017; Ollapally, 2018; Pant, 2013; Singh, 2018: Yhome, 2015). Further, to exchange expertise on various sectors like agriculture, health, education, fisheries, information technology, energy, transportation, security, and defence, and to enhance and cultivate people-to-people contact for reaping economic benefits from trade, research collaborations, travel and tourism (Naidu, 2013).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Bilateral Trade: Bilateral trade is a cross border transaction or commerce that occurs between two countries. Bilateral trade is an agreement between two countries, to promote trade and commerce between them which is mutually beneficial for economic development and stability. It opens markets and eliminates or reduces tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade and agrees not to dump unfairly goods in other country.
Multilateral Trade: Multilateral trade agreement occurs between three or more nations, and they are treated equally, and no one gets a most favoured nation status. The aim is to standardise commerce regulations, encourage exports and imports, reduced tariffs, and quotas between member countries. Multilateral agreements are beneficial to emerging markets developing countries as it makes them more competitive, and trade can be negotiated with more than one country at one time.
Capacity Building: Capacity building is defined as a process of one country helping the other country to solve problems, achieve joint goals, develop human and institutional resources, through training and transfer of technology. This helps to develop and strengthen the abilities, skills, knowledge, research, and development, of its citizens and country, to survive, adapt, thrive, and transform in the dynamic environment with the other from climate change, military dominance, global financial and economic crisis, and threat from pandemic viruses such as SARS and Coronavirus.
Sustainable Development: The Sustainable Development concept was introduced in 1987 by United Nations and is defined as any economic development programs which is capable to manage and utilise scare resources presently to maintain social, economic, and environmental sustainably to meet the needs of the future generations. Principles to achieve human development goals which are sustainable. The universal programs and policies that will lead to achieving United Nations 17-SDGs by 2030 by developed and developing countries. Overall aim of Act-East policies and programs should be to achieve the SDGs through peace, justice, and mutually beneficial partnerships.
Global Health Crisis: Epidemic and a pandemic can be descried as a global health crisis when large number of people die due to human-to-human transmission of a contagious viral disease like Coronavirus- COVID-19. In such a situation, the World Health Organisation declares that countries have to follow health regulations as provided by WHO for the public health safety of the citizens.