Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Uzbekistan this week on a two-day state visit, with New Delhi setting a target of pushing bilateral trade to $5 billion by 2030. The Adani Group has expressed interest in investing in new hydropower and pumped-storage hydropower projects in the Central Asian republic, building on talks that began in July. On paper, this is a straightforward story of India deepening its footprint in Central Asia — energy cooperation, trade diversification, a hedge against overreliance on any single regional partner. For readers in Delhi or Mumbai, it’s a foreign policy footnote. For readers in Agartala, it should raise a more pointed question: does any of this ever actually reach the Northeast, or is Central Asian connectivity a story that begins and ends in the corridors of South Block?
The honest answer, based on the pattern of the last decade, is mixed at best. India’s Central Asia strategy has consistently invoked “Connect Central Asia” and the International North-South Transport Corridor as instruments meant to open new trade arteries — but the geography of those arteries runs through Chabahar port in Iran, overland routes through Afghanistan and the Caucasus, or maritime lanes through the Arabian Sea. None of them touch India’s Northeast in any direct sense. Tripura’s own connectivity story has instead been built around a completely different set of partnerships: the Agartala-Akhaura rail link into Bangladesh, the Sabroom land port near the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the long-discussed Chittagong port access that would, if realized, cut Tripura’s route to the sea dramatically compared to the current dependence on Kolkata. Uzbekistan and Central Asia, however promising as a diplomatic and energy relationship, simply aren’t wired into that map.
This isn’t a reason to dismiss the Tashkent visit, and it isn’t an argument that every foreign policy initiative must have a Northeast component to matter. Trade diversification and energy security benefit the country as a whole, including states that never see a minister’s motorcade. But it is worth naming plainly, especially for a paper based in a border state that has spent years watching connectivity announcements made in Delhi that either take a decade to materialize locally or never arrive at all. The Agartala-Akhaura rail link itself is instructive: discussed for years, delayed repeatedly, and only in the past couple of years beginning to show tangible progress. If a project with a direct, obvious benefit to Tripura moves at that pace, it is fair to ask what priority a Central Asian hydropower and trade relationship — genuinely distant from the Northeast’s geography and interests — would ever receive in the queue.
There’s a more constructive version of this critique, and it’s the one dailyArchives should press rather than simply lament. India’s outreach to Central Asia is, in large part, about energy security and reducing dependence on any single supplier or route. Tripura and its neighboring states face their own version of that same problem, magnified by geography: dependence on a narrow land corridor through Assam for almost all overland connectivity to the rest of India, and chronic vulnerability to disruption whenever that corridor is affected by flooding, unrest, or infrastructure failure elsewhere. If New Delhi’s Central Asia policy is genuinely animated by a strategic logic of diversifying routes and reducing chokepoint dependence, that same logic argues even more strongly for accelerating alternate routes for Tripura through Bangladesh — routes where the diplomatic groundwork, unlike with distant Tashkent, has already been substantially laid.
There is also a quieter opportunity worth flagging. Adani’s interest in Uzbek hydropower is notable in a state, Tripura, that has its own underdeveloped hydropower potential and its own private-sector investment gaps in energy infrastructure. If large domestic conglomerates are willing to commit capital to hydropower projects in a foreign country with a $5 billion trade target as the incentive, it’s a fair question for Tripura’s own government to raise with those same companies: what would it take to draw a comparable scale of private investment into hydropower and renewable energy within the Northeast itself, where transmission losses and energy access remain real constraints on industrial growth?
None of this diminishes the legitimate diplomatic and economic case for engaging Uzbekistan. Central Asia matters to India’s broader strategic position, and a stronger trade relationship with Tashkent is not zero-sum against the Northeast’s interests. But readers in Tripura have learned, through years of connectivity promises that moved at glacial speed, to distinguish between foreign policy that generates headlines in Delhi and foreign policy that changes conditions on the ground at home. The test for this visit, and the ones that follow it, isn’t whether trade with Uzbekistan hits $5 billion by 2030. It’s whether the same energy, capital, and diplomatic urgency visible in Tashkent this week ever gets matched, with comparable seriousness, to the routes and partnerships that would actually move goods, people, and investment through Tripura’s own borders.
DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)