Young Scholar's Forum 2018

Recent times has seen a marked emphasis on promoting regional cooperation in Eastern South Asia, the Bay of Bengal region and extending up to the Indo Pacific region. While multilateralism in the form of regional cooperation has been successfully initiated and implemented in numerous parts of the world (ASEAN and the EU as striking examples), in the South Asian case, progress has been relatively slow in spite of established mechanisms such as SAARC, BIMSTEC, SASEC, MGC, BBIN, etc. Renewed efforts to revive and strengthen frameworks like BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative on multi-sectoral technical and Economic Cooperation), BBIN (Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal) are evident. The building concept of a larger Indo Pacific region strengthens the need to seek cooperation on both bilateral and multilateral terms for enhanced interaction and engagement at several levels: economic, security and socio cultural amongst India and her larger Eastern neighbourhood.