*Doctoral Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Agartala
**Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Agartala
Online published on 27 August, 2014.
India has undertaken a series of economic reforms towards opening up of the economy in the decade of the nineties. India has gone for free trade agreement with many nations. BIMSTEC is an important element in India's “Look East” strategy and adds a new dimension to India's economic cooperation with South East Asian countries. India BIMSTEC free trade agreement will promote trade and greater connectivity between India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Thailand. In this context the paper tries to identify complementary and competing sectors of trade between India and BIMSTEC countries to consolidate their strengths and to overcome the pitfalls. To study the trade complementarily and similarity the paper has used trade intensity index and revealed comparative advantage as a tool. The paper identifies the pattern of revealed comparative advantage using the Balassa (1965) index for export data.
