 "Why Bangladesh pulled plug on key internet deal with India")
I Bangladesh has pulled a plug on a key deal with India.
According to a report in the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s internet regulator has terminated a deal to let the country become the transit point for India’s northeastern states’ internet supply.
The permission to do so was provided under the regime of Sheikh Hasina, who has now fled to India.
But what happened? And how does it affect India’s services?
Let’s take a close look
What happened?
According to India Herald, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) in 2023 asked authorisation from the telecom ministry to provide internet to India’s Northeast.
This would be done from the Akhaura border separating the countries using bandwidth from Singapore.
As per Daily Star, the firms, Summit Communications and Fiber@Home, would use Bharti Airtel to provide internet to the region.
Muhammad Farid Khan, the chairman of Summit Communications, is the younger brother of Awami League presidium member Faruk Khan.
Muhammad is also a close from of Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy.
Both companies, Fiber@Home and Summit Communications, were the recipient of major contracts and licenses from the Hasina government.
India’s Northeast states, also called the Seven Sisters, are currently linked to Singapore via submarine cables in Chennai, as per Daily Star.
India is currently using its domestic fiber optic network to provide internet to these seven states.
However, the distance between Chennai and the Northeast, which is around 5,500 kilometres, leads to a degradation in internet speed.
The region’s location also makes maintaining the fiber optic networks and the installation of new networks notoriously hard.
Bangladesh providing internet from the border would have been a huge boost to India’s Northeast.
However, this decision makes things more difficult for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi government’s vow to develop and empower the Northeast to help India reach its potential.
“In the last decade, we have seen a wonderful journey of the development of the northeast but it was not easy. We have taken every possible step to connect the northeastern states with India’s growth story," Modi recently said.
“For a long time, we have seen how development was weighed against votes. Northeastern states had less votes and low seats so previous governments did not pay attention to the development of the region,” he added.
Why has it done so?
The regulator under the interim government of Muhammad Yunus has now cancelled the decision.
“The guidelines do not permit such ’transit’ arrangements,” BTRC chairman Md Emdad ul Bari told the Daily Star.
The BRTC in a document said the arrangement would have made India’s secured spot as a dominant internet hub and hurt the possibility that Bangladesh could do so in the future.
It added that it would also deter the likelihood that Dhaka could become a Point of Presence (PoP) for content delivery network (CDN) providers such as Meta, Google, Akamai and Amazon.
“Ultimately, the bandwidth from India will end up in India, reducing Bangladesh to merely a transit point,” Aminul Hakim, president of the Bangladesh Internet Governance Forum, told the newspaper.
Foreign Secretary visits Bangladesh
The development comes in the backdrop of Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visiting Bangladesh today (December 9).
This would be the first high-level diplomatic engagement between New Delhi and Dhaka since the Yunus government took power in August.
Misri on Monday held talks with his Bangladeshi counterpart Mohammad Jashim Uddin, amid strained bilateral ties since August following the ouster of prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
Misri arrived in Dhaka earlier in the day on an Indian Air Force jet for a day-long visit, officials said. It is the first high-level visit from New Delhi after a massive uprising ended Hasina’s 15-year rule in August.
A senior Bangladesh Foreign Ministry official received him at the airport. Indian High Commissioner Pranay Verma was also present at the airport.
Soon after his arrival, Misri held talks with Uddin. He will also meet the country’s de-facto foreign minister Mohammad Touhid Hossain.
He is also scheduled to pay a courtesy call to Yunus.
The development also comes as Bangladesh under its interim government seems to be inching closer to Pakistan and away from India.
The two countries have made a number of moves to improve relations.
This includes Bangladesh removing a requirement for Pakistani citizens to obtain a clearance from its security agency before applying for a visa, Pakistan waiving its visa fees for Bangladeshis, direct flights resuming between the two nations the re-establishment of direct maritime links after nearly five decades with a Pakistani freight ship from Karachi docked at Bangladesh’s southeastern Chittagong port.
With inputs from agencies
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