BRI and South Asia

In 2022, the Center for Global Asia (CGA) commenced a project on the “BRI and South Asia” to analyze the impact and connections of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the South Asian region. The project is being generously funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Since its launch in 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has received a lot of attention because of its engagement in infrastructure development in the host countries and the loans that were made to pay for it. There are also diverse voices and discourses on the BRI, which, being a Chinese initiative, is external to the host countries, and these voices are given prominence in the project. Interestingly, what has been said and written on the BRI’s involvement and projects has generally been negative.

Against this backdrop, the CGA’s “BRI and South Asia” project attempts to provide an alternative voice to the existing discourse on BRI-related commentary. It attempts to counter this narrative by identifying domestic voices from within the host countries. Thus, one of the objectives of this project is to compile information from vernacular sources, both human and textual. Compiling a bibliographic database containing local literature on the BRI would enable the Center to achieve this objective. Interviews and other media form the second activity that is helping to achieve the first objective. Currently, the information for the database comes from three countries: Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal. The Center intends to expand the research and data collection to the remaining BRI member states in South Asia.

The second objective of this project is to prepare a database of information about various aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative’s engagement with South Asian countries. Two sections of this project, the timelines and the archival material, are helping to achieve this objective. The section on the timeline describes each country’s engagement with the BRI since its inception. Thus far, we have timelines for three South Asian countries, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal.