Nepal in BIMSTEC: Membership and the 2024 BIMSTEC Charter

BIMSTEC stands for the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation. It is a regional grouping that links South Asia and Southeast Asia across the Bay of Bengal, and it now has seven member states: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The organisation was established on 6 June 1997 through the Bangkok Declaration and originally carried the name BIST-EC (Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand Economic Cooperation).

The group's name changed as its membership grew. Myanmar joined at the end of 1997, turning BIST-EC into BIMST-EC. When Nepal and Bhutan were admitted in 2004, the grouping was renamed at its first summit as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, keeping the familiar acronym BIMSTEC. Together the seven members are home to more than 1.8 billion people and a combined economy that the BIMSTEC Secretariat estimates at over USD 4.5 trillion.

For Nepal, a landlocked Himalayan country, BIMSTEC is one of the few multilateral bodies where it sits as an equal alongside large neighbours such as India and emerging Southeast Asian economies. The initiative focuses on practical, sector-by-sector cooperation in trade, connectivity, energy, security and people-to-people ties rather than on politically sensitive bilateral disputes, which is one reason it has continued to function while the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has stalled.

Nepal's engagement with BIMSTEC began before formal membership. In 1998, shortly after the grouping was founded, Nepal joined as an observer, giving it a seat at meetings without full voting rights. Around 2000 Nepal formally expressed its wish to become a full member, reflecting a foreign-policy interest in diversifying beyond SAARC and deepening ties with the wider Bay of Bengal region.

Nepal became a full member of BIMSTEC on 8 February 2004 (Magh 2060 BS), together with Bhutan. Their admission was confirmed at the Sixth Ministerial Meeting in Thailand in 2004 and celebrated at the First BIMSTEC Summit in Bangkok on 31 July 2004, when the grouping adopted its present multi-sectoral name. (Some Nepal government summaries describe Nepal as joining directly as a full member in 2004; the widely cited BIMSTEC and international record notes the earlier 1998 observer step.)

Membership tied Nepal into a growing web of BIMSTEC ministerial meetings, summits and sectoral working groups. Over the following two decades Nepal took on a leadership role within the organisation, chairing BIMSTEC from 2014 until August 2018 and steering the grouping through a period of renewed activity after years of slow progress.

Nepal's highest-profile contribution to BIMSTEC was hosting the Fourth BIMSTEC Summit in Kathmandu on 30-31 August 2018 (Bhadra 2075 BS). Held under the theme 'Towards a Peaceful, Prosperous and Sustainable Bay of Bengal Region,' the summit brought together the heads of state and government of all seven members and was chaired by then Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli.

The summit concluded with the 18-point Kathmandu Declaration, in which leaders committed to making BIMSTEC a more dynamic, effective and results-oriented organisation. A Memorandum of Understanding for the establishment of a BIMSTEC Grid Interconnection was signed, aimed at cross-border electricity trade, an area of direct interest to hydropower-rich Nepal. Leaders also called for reviewing and rationalising the organisation's sprawling areas of cooperation.

At the close of the summit, Prime Minister Oli handed the BIMSTEC chairmanship to Sri Lanka. Hosting the summit raised Nepal's diplomatic profile at a time when SAARC had gone dormant, and the Kathmandu Declaration's call to streamline BIMSTEC later fed into the 2022 reorganisation of the grouping's work.

For most of its history BIMSTEC operated without a founding treaty. That gap was closed by the BIMSTEC Charter, adopted at the Fifth BIMSTEC Summit in Colombo on 30 March 2022. The Charter gives BIMSTEC a legal personality for the first time, sets out its purposes and principles, formalises its institutional structure, and creates procedures for admitting new members and observers and for engaging with other countries and organisations.

Under Article 25 of the Charter, the treaty enters into force on the thirtieth day after the seventh member deposits its instrument of ratification with the BIMSTEC Secretary General. Nepal turned out to be that decisive seventh country. Nepal's House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha) endorsed the Charter on 2 April 2024, on a proposal by then Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha, in line with Article 279 of the Constitution and the Nepal Treaty Act, 2047 (1990), which require parliamentary approval of treaties.

Nepal's written instrument of ratification reached the BIMSTEC Secretariat in Dhaka on 21 April 2024. Thirty days later, on 20 May 2024, the BIMSTEC Charter formally entered into force, nearly 27 years after the grouping was created. Nepal thus holds the distinction of being the member state whose ratification finally activated the treaty that gives BIMSTEC its legal foundation.

BIMSTEC cooperation is organised into sectors, each anchored by a lead member state. Originally the grouping spread its work across 14 priority sectors, but this proved unwieldy. Following a recommendation of the 2021 ministerial meeting, the Fifth Summit in 2022 consolidated the work into seven sectors, each led by one member.

Nepal is the lead country for the People-to-People Contact sector, which covers cultural cooperation, tourism, poverty alleviation and people-to-people forums that connect think tanks, media, students and civil society across the region. The other six sectors and their leads are: Trade, Investment and Development (Bangladesh); Environment and Climate Change (Bhutan); Security (India); Agriculture and Food Security (Myanmar); Science, Technology and Innovation (Sri Lanka); and Connectivity (Thailand).

Leading the people-to-people sector suits Nepal's strengths in tourism, culture and Himalayan heritage, and it gives Kathmandu a coordinating role rather than a purely peripheral one. Nepal has consistently pushed for connectivity, energy trade and tourism to remain central to BIMSTEC's agenda.

For Nepali diplomacy, the rise of BIMSTEC is inseparable from the paralysis of SAARC. The last SAARC summit was the 18th, hosted in Kathmandu in November 2014; the planned 19th summit in Islamabad in 2016 was called off after India and several other members withdrew amid India-Pakistan tensions. No SAARC summit has been held since, leaving the eight-member South Asian body effectively frozen even though its charter and secretariat still exist.

BIMSTEC has advantages that help it avoid the same deadlock. It excludes the India-Pakistan rivalry that stalls SAARC, it bridges South and Southeast Asia, and since 2024 it rests on a formal Charter with a clear institutional framework. Momentum continued at the Sixth BIMSTEC Summit, hosted by Thailand in Bangkok on 4 April 2025, which adopted the 'Bangkok Vision 2030' and pushed for a BIMSTEC Free Trade Agreement and deeper connectivity.

Nepal's official position, however, is that BIMSTEC and SAARC are complementary rather than substitutes. During the 2024 parliamentary debate, the government stressed that Nepal does not accept advancing BIMSTEC at the cost of SAARC and continues to call for SAARC's revival. In practice, though, BIMSTEC is where active regional summitry now happens, which is why it features heavily in Nepal's foreign-policy discussions and in Lok Sewa (public service) examination syllabuses.