India’s Act East Policy and the Northeastern Region: Opportunities and Challenges

Tenzin Yingsel

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i01.67873

India’s Act East Policy and the Northeastern Region: Opportunities and Challenges

Author(s)	Ms Tenzin Yingsel
Country	India
Abstract	The Act East Policy (AEP) unveiled by India in 2014 signifies a paradigm change in the foreign policy of the country by focusing on closer economic, political and strategic relations with the Southeast Asian region and the larger Indo-Pacific area. In this context, the Northeastern part of India has been imagined as an important gateway to regional connectivity and integration because of its geographical association to the countries of the ASEAN and the similarity of the socio-cultural affiliation (Ministry of External Affairs [MEA], 2015). In this paper, the author will analyse the opportunities and challenges that relates to the adoption of AEP in Northeastern states specifically connectivity, economic integration and development in the region. The study is based on the secondary data, which involves peer-reviewed journals, government policy documents, and institutional reports, to examine how AEP has aimed at facilitating infrastructure development, cross-border trade, tourism, investment, and people-to-people connectivity in the region (RIS, 2025; Barua, 2020). The results show that despite the fact that AEP has created great opportunities, particularly due to large connectivity projects like transnational highways and multimodal corridors, the actual enjoyed benefits have been skewed. Chronic problems such as infrastructure gaps, poor governance and institutions, security, geopolitical instability in the neighbouring state, and environmental limitations have mitigated the efficacy of the policy (Horam, 2024; ORF, 2025). The paper finds that despite the fact that AEP has put the Northeastern region at the heart of the regional engagement strategy, policy vision, and focus at outcomes are still separated by institutional coordination, region-specific development strategies, measures of trade facilitation and sustainable implementation structures. These issues need to be addressed in order to make sure that the Northeastern region becomes an active beneficiary of the Act East Policy of India.
Keywords	Act East Policy, Northeastern Region, Regional connectivity, Socio-economic Development, ASEAN
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 1, January-February 2025
Published On	2025-02-05
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i01.67873

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India’s Act East Policy and the Northeastern Region: Opportunities and Challenges

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