Published in Daily Sun on Tuesday, 6 May 2014.
Carving out Economic Corridor
BCIM meet likely to be deferred for Indian polls
Monirul Alam
The second meeting of the potential Asian bloc styled BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar) scheduled for June in Dhaka to shape up a vast economic corridor is unlikely to be held on schedule due to inconveniences of Indian authorities for election.
Members of the joint working group of BCIM on economic corridor are now learnt to be corresponding among themselves to reschedule the meet, likely in the second week of August.
India is passing through month-long national elections that will continue till middle of the current month while Bangladesh will remain engaged in planning its national budget for next fiscal, starting from July, and observe fasting during the holy Ramdan next month.
“Holding the meeting in June will not be possible as the entire month is crucial for the government to present and clarify the national budget. On the other hand, July is the fasting month,” a highly placed source told daily sun on Sunday.
Earlier on March 25, state minister for foreign affairs Shahriar Alam told reporters that the BCIM meeting on proposed economic corridor would be held in Dhaka in June. Chinese Ambassador in Bangladesh Li Jun and Assistant High Commissioner of India Swandip Chakraborty accompanied the minister when he made the statement.
The corridor, as agreed by stakeholders, will run from Kunming to Kolkata, linking Mandalay in Myanmar as well as Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh. The plan would “advance multimodal connectivity, harness the economic complementarities, promote investment and trade and facilitate people-to-people contacts”, reported Indian daily The Hindu in its December 21st issue last year.
Experts expect the corridor to ease the flow of goods between the world’s two largest economies—India and China—and provide greater economic resources to the burgeoning markets of Bangladesh and Myanmar. The four member-countries, with their total GDP of $9,300 billion, have the potential to become a strong bloc in global economy.
The cause of deepening cooperation in the BCIM region had earlier received recognition at the highest political levels through the communiqués issued following the visits of Bangladesh Prime Minister to China in 2010, of Indian Prime Minister to China in 2012 and of the Chinese Prime Minister to India in 2013.
Bangladesh’s independent civil-society think-tank Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) says the BCIM has been among the recent initiatives that warranted heightened attention and importance on part of all stakeholders and received formal endorsement through the first inter-governmental study-group meeting in Kunming on 18-19 December 2013.
According to the CPD, this particular grouping had some unique attributes which could potentially bring significant benefits to the four participating countries through the deepening of economic cooperation and integration by leveraging on three counts of connectivity: transport connectivity, trade connectivity and investment connectivity.
The four nations have for the first time drawn up a specific timetable on taking forward the long-discussed plan, emphasising the need of quickly improving physical connectivity in the region.
India and China have taken the first step towards pushing forward an ambitious corridor linking the two countries with Bangladesh and Myanmar.
China, officials say, sees the corridor as a platform to not only boost strategic ties with India but also as a means to inject vitality into its landlocked southwestern provinces, which have the highest poverty rates in China.
To underline that no country dominates the initiative, the four nations in joint communiqué said the economic corridor will be taken forward on the basis of “the principles of mutual trust and respect, mutual interest, equitable sharing of mutual benefits”.
As a first step, the four countries will identify realistic and achievable infrastructure projects to boost physical connectivity.
Over the next six months, each country will come up with a joint study report proposing concrete projects and financing modalities, before the next meeting of the four nations in June 2014, hosted by Bangladesh.
The hope is that before the holding of the third joint study meeting, in India towards the end of 2014, the four countries will have agreed upon a cooperation framework – including modalities of financing projects – that will pave the way for on-the-ground work to begin.
The three BCIM Forums which were held in Bangladesh, and hosted by the CPD (in 2002, 2007 and 2013), were attended by ministers and high-level policymakers of Bangladesh who were exposed to the potential benefits that could originate from closer BCIM-wide cooperation.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh premier Sheikh Hasina welcomed this initiative and pledged to take it forward by means of proper cooperation.