Every autumn, Cuttack floats paper boats on the Mahanadi for Bali Yatra, recalling Kalinga’s merchants sailing from this coast to Java and Sumatra. That route belonged to the coast centuries before any government policy existed. The Northeast built a different tie to the Southeast — overland. Mizo and Chin families can still cross into Myanmar without an interpreter. However, when Act East arrived, it spoke mostly of the Northeast’s road and barely of the coast’s water.
Paradip and Haldia sit closer than any other major Indian port to the Malacca Strait, the channel between Sumatra and Malaysia used by most ships heading to Southeast Asia. Yet Nhava Sheva, near Mumbai, handled more than eight times as much container cargo last year as Calcutta and Haldia combined. The reason is depth. The Hooghly takes nothing larger than a mid-sized vessel, so an exporter ships first to Colombo or Singapore, then onto a bigger hull, losing days and margin at the transfer.
Partition put Chittagong in another country and left the Northeast landlocked. Bengal and Odisha hold the coastline that could undo that. The Northeast grows two-thirds of India’s bamboo, and Meghalaya’s Lakadong turmeric is a coveted spice for global food and wellness sectors. Each half holds what the other needs to reach markets abroad, but no single window exists for an investor to get the overall picture.
Eastern India became a planning case in 1948 with the Damodar Valley Corporation. The hills, meanwhile, became a security question after the Naga uprising, handled through the Union home ministry rather than any economic one. The split has never closed. The Purvodaya scheme funds the eastern states, UNNATI and PM-DevINE the Northeast, but they run through separate desks. An investor chasing incentives in Bengal and in Nagaland still finds two separate doors.
In 1960-61, West Bengal held 10.5% of national output. By 2023-24, that share had fallen to 5.6%, the largest decline among states recorded by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. The Northeast never had a comparable peak to fall from. Its eight states hold about 8% of India’s land and produce under 3% of its output.
Both halves have been stirring, separately. West Bengal has moved its deep-water port plan from Tajpur to Dadanpatrabar. The state has revisited its Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act, which had blocked large land purchases. Upriver, Numaligarh has commissioned the world’s first plant turning bamboo into ethanol. Jagiroad began packaging semiconductors in May, ahead of schedule, and will reach full capacity by the end of the year.
Hypothetically, a chip packaged at Jagiroad could travel down the Brahmaputra on National Waterway 2, cross into the routes under treaty through Bangladesh, and leave for Southeast Asia from a berth on the Bengal coast. In reality, the deep-sea port at Dadanpatrabar is still a blueprint. National Waterway 2 ends at Dhubri on the border, and Bangladesh handed the Mongla economic zone to a Chinese partner in June. By land, the cargo must squeeze through the Siliguri Corridor, a strip of West Bengal 20 kilometres wide between Bangladesh and Nepal, or take the Manipur highway, repeatedly blockaded since the 2023 ethnic conflict, where transport costs are priced by the route’s worst stretch.
Kaladan, begun in 2003, would put cargo on a ship to Sittwe in Myanmar and on a road into Mizoram, 700 km off the Aizawl-to-Calcutta run. Its last stretch is unbuilt and the 2027 deadline is tight. The India-Myanmar-Thailand highway runs from Moreh to Mae Sot; 70% of it has been finished since 2023. National Waterway 1 carries freight down the Ganga to Haldia. Rail runs from upper Assam to the Bengal ports. River, rail, road and open sea, four ways from one region to the same market. A container uses two or three modes in one journey and no one has designed them to work together across the eastern region.
That disorder is a domestic problem. It has not stopped outside money. Japan’s loans paid for Calcutta’s East-West *metro and for the bamboo refinery at Numaligarh, the same money crossing the region without pausing at a border. July’s joint statement named the Northeast and reaffirmed a target of 10 trillion yen in private Japanese investment for India over the decade. Two hundred business representatives have gone to Tokyo to turn that money into contracts, coast and hills in the same delegation. An investor treats this as a single market. The region still presents itself as two.
Division weakens the case for the East. An investor looking at the region today faces separate pitches and no way to compare them. This is where an East Investment Platform could come in. It would open one window for the five eastern and eight northeastern states, with one certified list of sites and incentives behind it. The region’s chambers and think tanks would build the rest of it. This would include summits where Odisha explains its investor desk to Nagaland and Mizoram explains its border trade to Bihar, regular chief minister exchanges across the two halves, and a price for the whole corridor, which no state can work out alone.
Bali Yatra returns in November. Cuttack will float its boats for a trade route that no policy built. Kalinga’s merchants had a harbour deep enough and a market that wanted what they carried. The east and the Northeast can have both again. Arranging it between themselves would be the shorter passage.
Totini Mitra is a member of the Research and Consulting team of Intueri