Countries of the Bay of Bengal
Historically, the Bay of Bengal has been a highway of transport, trade, and cultural exchange between diverse peoples encompassing the Indian subcontinent, Indochinese peninsula, and Malay Archipelago.
The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) promotes regional engagement in the area.
[7] Islam in Southeast Asia also spread through the Bay of Bengal, by serving as a bridge between the Malay Archipelago and Indo-Islamic states in the subcontinent.
[8][9] In the 14th and 15th centuries, explorers like Ibn Battuta of Morocco, Niccolo De Conti of the Venetian Republic, and Admiral Zheng He of Imperial China ventured through the Bay of Bengal.
During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 over Bangladesh's independence, the Indian and Pakistani navies engaged in naval combat in the Bay of Bengal.
[15] The Rohingya refugee crisis, caused by persecution in Myanmar's Rakhine State, has been a major humanitarian and security challenge in the region.
Its littoral areas — including coastal regions of eastern India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Sumatra — are home to over half a billion people.
Jakarta Chennai Yangon Fisheries is an important economic activity in countries with coasts along the Bay of Bengal, particularly in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Based on a recent estimate, the total number employed on a full-time basis in fisheries in the area covered by the Bay of Bengal is 1.85 million.
[26] In recent years, the fishing industry has developed into an important earner of foreign exchange through the export of marine and aquatic products.
It is in Thailand alone, that the private/commercial sector has taken the initiative of introducing and extending craft and gear; there has been very little state support or intervention in these activities in this country.
The Port of Colombo in Sri Lanka handles over 5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)s of container traffic.
Chittagong is the busiest seaport on the Bay of Bengal coastline,[27] followed by Chennai, Kolkata, Tuticorin, Yangon, Visakhapatnam, and Mongla.
[33][34] Colombo Chittagong Kolkata Vizag The Bay of Bengal has large untapped oil and natural gas reserves.
[46] The Bay of Bengal has non-traditional security challenges of piracy, human trafficking, terrorist networks, and drug smuggling, which has led to greater cooperation between the navies of Bangladesh, India, the United States, and Thailand.
[47][48][49] In 2014, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced an initiative to develop an industrial corridor in Bangladesh to strengthen Japan's economic footprint in the region.
[52][53] The United States, a major Indo-Pacific naval power, conducts the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) involving Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
The Bay of Bengal region has seen some of modern history's worst natural disasters, such as the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
