India’s apex business chamber, FICCI, sees the construction of Padma Bridge in Bangladesh as an important way of connecting the sub-region for trade and investment apart from infrastructural development.
“Yes, connectivity is an important factor in the flow of trade,” Goutam Ghosh, senior director and regional head for South Asia, in FICCI, told a Bangladesh media delegation on Friday while replying to a question of the impacts of Padma Bridge for the bilateral trade and investment.
The delegation is visiting India at the invitation of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Padma Bridge, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on June 25, is considered to be the most challenging construction project in the history of Bangladesh. It links the southwest of Bangladesh to the northern and eastern regions.
Ghosh said the “sub-regional economic cooperation is growing much faster pace than bilateral collaboration because with the kind of connectivity that we are developing, transshipment and direct flow of goods and services have become much easier”.
He gave examples of Indian connectivity with Bangladesh, and Bangladesh with Bhutan through Chicken’s Neck, the Siliguri Corridor in West Bengal, India.
“Different parties are involved in different points to take the trade across boundaries into the destination. You are moving a Bangladeshi truck to the Chicken’s Neck, from there an Indian truck is carrying that into the Bhutan and Nepal border and then there is transshipment,” he said, giving an example of multi-country involvement in the whole supply chain.
FICCI, which was established in 1927, has collaboration with Bangladesh's apex business chamber, FBCCI. Together, they do exchanges of business visits, policy and knowledge interactions, among others.
India and Bangladesh share bonds of history, language, culture, and multitude of other commonalities. The bilateral ties reflect an all-encompassing partnership based on “sovereignty, equality, trust, and understanding that goes far beyond a strategic partnership”.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been intense high-level engagements at political and official levels.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is expected to visit India in September.
The FICCI director, Ghosh, said India already has huge investment in Bangladesh. “It is growing in many sectors.”
“We see emerging sectors like IT coming up in a big way,” he said, adding that Indian companies are also going to Bangladesh in different non-traditional sectors now more than before.
The two-way trade is more than $10 billion.
