VIENTIANE, October 10 — Participating in the 21st ASEAN-India Summit and the 19th East Asia Summit (EAS) hosted in Vientiane, Lao PDR, India on Saturday unveiled a comprehensive 10-point action plan celebrating a decade of India's 'Act East Policy' and strengthening the ASEAN-India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
Addressing the heads of state of the ten ASEAN member nations, Indian leadership announced an additional \$50 million replenishment to the ASEAN-India Science, Technology and Development Fund to accelerate joint deployment of open-source Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), real-time cross-border retail payment linkages, and regional cyber incident response networks. Both blocs issued a joint directive to fast-track the modernization review of the ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA, originally signed in 2009) to eliminate non-tariff barriers and balance bilateral merchandise trade exceeding \$130 billion.
The 10-point charter further doubles postdoctoral fellowships for ASEAN scholars at Nalanda University, establishes a regional center for disaster resilience, and accelerates physical connectivity along the India-Myanmar-Thailand (IMT) Trilateral Highway with proposed eastward extensions into Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Both sides reaffirmed unwavering adherence to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in preserving maritime freedom of navigation across the Indo-Pacific and South China Sea.
The institutional evolution of ASEAN (founded via the 1967 Bangkok Declaration, Secretariat in Jakarta), India's trajectory from Look East (1991) to Act East Policy (2014), convergence between the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), and AITIGA trade negotiations are central pillars of UPSC Civil Services (GS-II: International Relations).