Jakarta. India wants Indonesia to be part of the BIMSTEC, a New Delhi-led multi-trillion bloc, as it wants to double down trade with Jakarta.

The seven-member BIMSTEC is short for Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation. The group brings together countries bordering the Bay of Bengal, a large embayment nested in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Its boundary reaches up to the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Like traditional international groupings, BIMSTEC deals with boosting trade and other forms of cooperation. The bloc encompasses Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, bringing the combined gross domestic product (GDP) to $5 trillion. Indian Ambassador to Indonesia Sandeep Chakravorty said Monday that New Delhi wanted Jakarta to be the club’s eighth member, citing that other ASEAN nations had already joined in.

“Indonesia should look at becoming a member of the BIMSTEC. They [the group] recently changed its charter and are now allowing new members,” Chakravorty told a conference in Jakarta.

Indonesia reported its trade with India had declined from $27 billion in 2023 to $26 billion the following year. Indonesia’s annual exports remained at around $20 billion over the same period. Bilateral trade only reached almost $13.7 billion in the first seven months of 2025, quite a drop from the $15.6 billion recorded in January-July 2024. Chakravorty admitted that it could be difficult for both sides to reach their $50 billion bilateral trade target, saying that there was nothing wrong with revising it to a more realistic goal.

India is the biggest economy in BIMSTEC and Indonesia’s biggest trading partner within the group, seconded by Thailand. The two Southeast Asian nations engaged in $17.4 billion worth of trade last year, data showed.

Both Thailand and Bhutan have proposed the establishment of an intra-BIMSTEC free trade area.

The Jakarta Globe has reached out to the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Vahd Nabyl A Mulachela for comments, particularly on Indonesia’s interest in the bloc and whether official talks had begun for membership. 

Add as a preferred source on Google +