Something unusual happened across the various crises that struck South Asia between 2022 and 2024. As commodity prices surged, foreign exchange reserves collapsed, and energy supply chains convulsed under the pressure of war and geopolitical disruption, Bangladesh did not face them entirely alone. Fuel arrived through a pipeline. Wheat kept crossing the border. Electricity continued flowing through transmission lines that paid no attention to the turbulence on either side. The systems that India and Bangladesh had built together in the years before the crisis arrived held.
That experience, unremarkable in the moment for those who rely on such things working, carries a lesson that the rest of South Asia has yet to fully absorb.
The region remains among the most fragile in the world when it comes to external shocks.
Sri Lanka’s economic collapse in 2022 was rapid and devastating. Pakistan has cycled through recurring balance-of-payments emergencies that leave its population absorbing the consequences of decisions made in distant commodity markets. Nepal’s exposure to fuel import disruptions has repeatedly demonstrated how quickly energy vulnerability becomes a political crisis. These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a structural condition–South Asian economies that face the volatility of global markets largely on their own, without the regional coordination mechanisms that would allow them to cushion shocks collectively.
The India–Bangladesh partnership suggests that a different arrangement is possible.
The foundation of that partnership is not only a grand regional framework or a multilateral treaty, it is also something more modest and more durable. It is a set of standing institutional mechanisms–including the bilateral Joint Working Group on Trade–that keep essential supply chains in continuous coordination rather than activating them only when emergencies demand it.
Diesel, wheat, electricity, and logistics are standing agenda items, not crisis-response improvisations. The difference between a supply system that functions before a crisis and one that is assembled during it is the difference between managed disruption and genuine hardship.
Energy cooperation is where this model is most developed. The cross-border electricity trade between India and Bangladesh, the joint Maitree plant at Rampal, and the Friendship Pipeline together represent something that rarely exists in South Asia that is genuinely integrated energy infrastructure that serves both countries’ needs and creates mutual incentives for its continued operation.
During periods of global fuel price volatility, this integration gave Bangladesh access to energy that its own reserves of foreign exchange could not reliably purchase on international markets. India, in turn, reinforced its role as a regional anchor, not through financial dominance but through operational reliability.
The same logic applies to food. Climate disruption is already affecting agricultural production across South Asia, and the trend is not improving. The wheat crisis of 2022, in which Bangladesh’s reliance on Black Sea grain exports was suddenly exposed, demonstrated how quickly food security can shift from a background concern to an acute emergency.
India’s ability to maintain supplies across the border during that period, under its own domestic pressures, was a function of the relationship depth built over the years. That kind of capacity does not appear on demand. It requires investment in supply infrastructure, institutional trust, and policy frameworks developed long before the emergency arrives.
A broader South Asian solidarity framework, built incrementally on these foundations, could include coordinated strategic reserves of food and fuel, preferential emergency trade arrangements that activate during crises, expanded cross-border electricity grid integration, standing crisis-response channels between governments, and joint infrastructure financing mechanisms.
None of this requires the creation of a new regional organisation from scratch—South Asia already has enough of those. It requires the extension of what already works bilaterally into a wider network of subregional agreements, anchored around practical cooperation and governed by the same logic that has made the India–Bangladesh model effective: systems built before emergencies, embedded in everyday economic life, maintained by mutual interest rather than periodic political will.
For India, the geopolitical implications are significant. Regional influence in South Asia is often discussed in terms of strategic competition, particularly with China, whose infrastructure financing across the region has expanded considerably in recent years. But durable influence is not built primarily through financial leverage or infrastructure loans. It is built through reliability.
A country that consistently delivers energy, food, and connectivity to its neighbours during difficult periods earns a form of trust that strategic positioning alone cannot generate. The India–Bangladesh experience demonstrates this with some clarity: India’s credibility in Dhaka rests not on any declared strategic alignment but on the accumulated record of supply chains that held when global conditions made holding them difficult.
Positioning itself as the architect of regional resilience, rather than simply a dominant regional power, would give India something that its size alone cannot guarantee: the voluntary investment of its neighbours in the region’s collective stability. Countries that benefit from shared infrastructure and coordinated supply systems have reasons to sustain those systems that go beyond any specific government’s foreign policy preferences. That is the kind of influence that outlasts electoral cycles.
South Asia is entering a period in which the disruptions it has faced over the past several years are likely to become more frequent rather than less. Climate shocks, global commodity volatility, energy transition pressures, and geopolitical fragmentation are not temporary conditions that the region can wait out. They are the environment in which South Asian economies will have to grow, govern, and manage their people’s expectations for the foreseeable future.
The question is whether the region faces that environment as a collection of isolated national economies, each absorbing shocks alone, or as a network of interconnected systems capable of distributing risk and sustaining each other through disruption.
The India–Bangladesh model does not answer that question for the whole of South Asia. But it demonstrates, with enough practical evidence to be persuasive, that the second option is not merely an aspiration. It is achievable with one pipeline, one power line, and one standing working group at a time.