The BRI and South Asia

In 2022 the Center for Global Asia (CGA) launched the project “The BRI and South Asia” to analyze the impact and connections of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the South Asian region. Since its launch in 2013, the BRI has received a lot of attention due its engagement in infrastructure development in host countries and for the vast sums it has lent to partner countries. There are also a variety of voices and discourses on the BRI. Much of what has been written has been from outside host countries, and it is these voices that are given prominence even in the international media.

Against this backdrop, the CGA’s the BRI and South Asia project attempts to provide an alternative voice to the existing discourse on BRI-related commentary. It tries to counter this narrative by identifying domestic voices from within host countries. Thus, one of the objectives of this project is to compile information from vernacular sources: human and textual. CGA intends to achieve this objective by compiling database platform containing a detailed bibliography of local literature on the BRI. Interviews and other media are the second component of the database. A third component is the timeline of how various South Asian countries engaged with the BRI project from 2013 to the present. The final component is the collection of relevant archival material from the South Asian countries on their engagement with the BRI project. CGA intends to make the entire database accessible to the public by August 2026.