16th ASEAN-India Summit

News:Indian Prime minister has attended the 16th India-ASEAN summit held in Bangkok,Thailand.

Facts:

Key takeaways from the summit:

• India has allocated 1 billion USD as line of credit to improve physical and digital connectivity.
• The ASEAN countries has acknowledged India’s growing role in the Indo-Pacific for the first time after the bloc came out with an Outlook for the region.
• India also welcomed the decision to review India ASEAN FTA saying it will improve economic partnership between the two countries.
• On the socio-cultural front, the focus was made on enhancing people-to-people connectivity, cultural exchanges, humanitarian aid and tourism.
• Indian PM has also announced that India would be looking at creating an endowment of Rs 50 million for promoting exchanges between faculty as well as students under India-ASEAN network.

Additional information:

About ASEAN:

• The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN was established in 1967 with the signing of the Bangkok Declaration.
• The members of ASEAN are Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, The Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Brunei, and Laos.

India and ASEAN:

• India’s focus to strengthen relationship with the ASEAN countries started since 1990’s with the country’s search for economic space which resulted in the ‘Look East Policy’ which has been matured to ‘Act East Policy’.
• ASEAN is India’s fourth largest trading partner.India’s trade with ASEAN stands at 81.33 billion USD.
• India and ASEAN have a combined population of 1.9 billion, which is a quarter of the world’s population and the combined GDP of around $5 trillion.
• The FDI inflows from ASEAN between 2000 and 2018 into India has been 68.91 billion USD.The FDI outflows from India to the ASEAN countries have been 38.672 billion USD.