New Delhi:
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), the flagship connectivity project announced on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in New Delhi in 2023, remains very much alive despite months of regional turbulence, the EU’s Ambassador to India Herve Delphin has said in an exclusive interview to NDTV, pushing back on suggestions that the project has stalled.
Acknowledging that recent upheaval in the Middle East could be seen as putting IMEC “on the back burner”, the ambassador argued the opposite was true.
“It vindicates the necessity of such a corridor,” he said, describing IMEC not as a single linear route but as “a network of networks” spanning digital, sea and road transport layers designed to maximise the flow of trade, data and people between the two regions.
As one of the initiative’s founding members, the ambassador said the EU remains “fully committed” to realising the corridor and pointed to concrete projects already underway.
Chief among them is the Blue Raman submarine cable, a project backed by European private capital and supported by European public de-risking investment, which will connect Europe to India with a sub-connection extending to Africa.
A second initiative, a “green shipping corridor” between India and Europe, is also progressing through working groups that have held a series of meetings, he said.
The ambassador cautioned against expecting overnight results, calling IMEC “a project for the long haul” that will not move at “a trailblazing pace” but will nonetheless prove strategically decisive over time. He said Europe and India, sitting at opposite ends of the corridor, share a direct interest in pushing it forward.
The conversation around IMEC was closely tied to broader questions of trust and reliability — themes that ran through the ambassador’s remarks on why India is increasingly viewed as a dependable partner. He pointed to China as the source of major global economic imbalances and said both India and the EU now prioritise diversification and “de-risking” of supply chains, with India positioned to be a credible alternative production base. He cited 6,000 European companies already invested in India, contributing about 6 per cent of the country’s export value, as proof that European business confidence in India is not theoretical but already being acted upon.
On the Indo-Pacific more broadly, the ambassador said the EU recognises India as “one of the anchors” capable of bringing stability to a region through which 30 to 40 per cent of European trade passes. He stressed Europe “will not divest from the Indo-Pacific”, even as Washington’s posture toward regional groupings like the Quad appears to soften.
Energy security featured as another marker of reliability, with the ambassador drawing a direct line between Europe’s costly overdependence on Russian gas and oil — now being wound down — and the broader argument for diversified, resilient supply chains that IMEC is designed to support. “It is bound to affect you at some point,” he said of relying too heavily on a single source, a lesson he suggested both India and Europe have now internalised.
Taken together, the Ambassador’s comments suggest Brussels views IMEC less as a short-term infrastructure fix and more as a long-term bet on India as a trustworthy, stable anchor in a region reshaped by conflict, China’s economic weight, and a more transactional United States.
