India on Saturday elevated its 30-year-long ties with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership even because it moved so as to add extra navy heft to the relations with a maritime battle drill with all the ten international locations of the bloc early subsequent 12 months.

New Delhi’s transfer to step up maritime safety cooperation with the ten South East Asian nations got here amid China’s rising belligerence, not solely alongside its disputed boundary with India within the Himalayas, but additionally within the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere within the Indo-Pacific area.

The defence ministers of India and the ten ASEAN nations will even maintain a gathering later this month.

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar attended the nineteenth India-ASEAN summit with the leaders of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam at Phnom Penh.

They agreed to advance maritime cooperation, together with in maritime safety, countering piracy and armed theft towards ships, maritime security, and search and rescue operations, humanitarian help, catastrophe administration, and emergency response and reduction.

India and the ten ASEAN nations will even improve cooperation towards terrorism and transnational crimes together with worldwide financial crimes and cash laundering, cybercrime, medicine and human trafficking and arms smuggling.

The cybersecurity cooperation between India and the ASEAN will entail establishing new dialogue platforms. India will work carefully with the ASEAN-Singapore Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence and the ADMM (ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting) Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence, in accordance with a joint assertion issued after the vice chairman’s assembly with the leaders of the South-East Asian nations.

They additionally determined to expedite the assessment of the ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) to make it extra user-friendly, easy and trade-facilitative.

The ATIGA got here into pressure in January 2010.

New Delhi is eager to assessment the settlement and introduce extra safeguards to make it certain that China can now not benefit from the commerce concessions India presents to the South-East Asian nations.

The merchandise commerce and funding flows between the ASEAN and India stood at $97 billion and $2 billion respectively in 2019 – simply earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. India was the sixth largest commerce associate of the ASEAN and the eighth largest supply of overseas direct funding to the bloc.

The ASEAN-India commerce had declined 14 per cent to $65.6 billion in 2020. India, nevertheless, remained one of many ASEAN’s largest buying and selling companions. It additionally continued to be one of many largest sources of FDI to the South East Asian nations with contemporary investments of $2.1 billion in 2020.

New Delhi, nevertheless, has been complaining about India’s exports to the South-East Asian nations being impeded by “non-reciprocity in FTA concessions, non-tariff barriers, import restrictions, quotas and export taxes from ASEAN countries”.

India’s exports to the ASEAN nations suffered as a consequence of restrictive limitations, significantly within the agriculture and auto sectors.

The India-ASEAN summit on Saturday noticed the 2 sides agreeing to work collectively to forge resilient provide chains, discover cooperation on Single Window platform to reinforce commerce facilitation and integration and promote the event of MSMEs and start-ups, together with by way of business-matching occasions with the facilitation by the ASEAN-India Business Council (AIBC).

They agreed to reinforce ASEAN-India cooperation on the digital economic system by way of a sequence of regional capacity-building actions in digital transformation, digital commerce, digital abilities and innovation, in addition to Hackathons, in accordance with the joint assertion.

India and the ASEAN nations additionally agreed to discover fintech cooperation, together with unified and interoperable digital monetary techniques, which might increase alternatives for companies and e-commerce.