For years, Delhi has spoken of Northeast India not as a frontier, but as a gateway — the strategic land bridge through which India would connect to Southeast Asia. Yet even after a decade of promises, many of those corridors remain incomplete, delayed, or trapped between ambition and ground reality.
Urmi Bhattacharjee
Guwahati, May 26: For more than a decade, Delhi has described Northeast India as India’s land bridge to Southeast Asia — a strategic frontier that would connect India eastward into Myanmar, Thailand and wider ASEAN markets through highways, ports and trade corridors.
That vision produced some of India’s most ambitious connectivity projects.
The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, linking Kolkata to Sittwe Port in Myanmar, onward through the Kaladan river and by road into Mizoram, was designed to give the landlocked Northeast alternative access to the sea while reducing logistical dependence on the narrow Siliguri corridor. Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal recently said the project would be fully operational by 2027, calling it a strategic initiative to enhance connectivity between India’s Northeast and Myanmar.
“The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project is set to be fully operational by 2027, providing direct and shorter access to international sea routes and strengthening the Act East vision,” Sonowal said while reviewing the project.
But Kaladan is also a reminder of how long India’s eastward bridge has remained unfinished.
The Northeast was never meant to be only India’s frontier. Under the Act East Policy, it was supposed to become a gateway — a region from which roads, ports and border trade routes would connect India to Southeast Asia.
Kaladan was one part of that vision.
Another was the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, the proposed 1,360-km overland corridor from Moreh in Manipur to Mae Sot in Thailand, meant to create India’s first direct land route into mainland Southeast Asia. Yet years after repeated deadlines, sections remain incomplete, underlining the fragility of India’s larger connectivity ambitions in the region.
That contradiction is perhaps most visible in Moreh, Manipur’s border town long projected as India’s gateway to ASEAN trade.
Moreh was supposed to be a frontier logistics hub — the point where India’s overland corridor eastward would begin. Instead, instability and border tensions have repeatedly undercut that promise, exposing the gap between strategic vision and frontier reality.
Sonowal, while reiterating the 2027 timeline for Kaladan, said the Northeast was now “poised for direct and shorter access to international sea routes” under India’s Act East vision. It is a powerful promise — and one Delhi has repeated for years.
But the central question remains unchanged.
India has spent more than a decade speaking of gateways, corridors and strategic geography in the Northeast. The maps remain compelling. The promise remains alive.
What remains uncertain is whether India’s long-promised bridge to Southeast Asia will finally open in the way it was once imagined.
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