Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on August 7 suggested the seven member countries of the BIMSTEC bloc to relook and re-examine the proposed free trade agreement as the talks for the pact is progressing at a very slow pace.
BIMSTEC stands for the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation. Its seven members are five South Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka) and two Southeast Asian countries (Myanmar and Thailand).
The bloc has been negotiating a proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) since 2004.
So far over 20 rounds of talks have been held. The last one was held in 2018.
“I would like to raise a few fundamental issues about where we stand and what are the possibilities of making this FTA a reality,” Goyal said here at CIIs BIMSTEC Business Summit 2024. He said that so far 22 rounds of talks have been held for the agreement and this itself raises a question on whether “we need to pause and have a relook at the track where we are going”.