8 active areas of cooperation, as of 20 June 2024. Click any card for the full brief.
01 HIGH-LEVEL EXCHANGES DEEP
17 leader-level exchanges since 2014 High-level exchange between India and Nepal has been continuous since 1947, formalised by the India-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed 31 July 1950 - a foundational document giving each country's nationals reciprocal rights of residence, property, trade and movement, and requiring Indian consent for certain Nepali defence purchases, a provision that has periodically generated friction over perceived asymmetry even as it has anchored the relationship for over seven decades.
Visit frequency picked up markedly after PM Modi's first visit to Nepal in 2014 (itself the first standalone bilateral visit by an Indian PM in 17 years), part of the broader 'Neighbourhood First' policy prioritising immediate neighbours; the Joint Commission mechanism, co-chaired by the two countries' Foreign/External Affairs Ministers, met five times between 2014 and 2024, most recently in Kathmandu in January 2024.
Since May 2014 there have been 17 exchanges at Head of State/Government level - PM Modi has visited Nepal five times and Nepali PMs have visited India ten times - including PM Prachanda's standalone visit in May-June 2023 and his attendance at PM Modi's swearing-in ceremony in June 2024, reflecting a deliberately high-frequency diplomatic relationship compared with most of India's other neighbours.
17 EXCHANGES SINCE 2014 JOINT COMMISSION
Read brief → 02 CONNECTIVITY DEEP
Rail links, ICPs and cross-border pipelines Connectivity has always mattered more for Nepal than for most of India's neighbours because Nepal is landlocked, entirely dependent on transit through India for sea access - a dependence formalised through decades of bilateral Transit Treaties dating back to the 1950s and periodically renegotiated, most consequentially during a damaging 2015 border blockade that exposed how vulnerable Nepal's supply chains were to any friction with India.
Physical infrastructure modernisation accelerated from the mid-2010s: the Jayanagar-Bijalpura-Bardibas line became Nepal's first broad-gauge railway, leading to the first-ever cross-border passenger train service (Jayanagar-Kurtha, April 2022) and freight service the following year - a historic first for rail connectivity between the two countries. Integrated Check Posts were built at Birgunj, Biratnagar, Nepalgunj and Bhairahawa to modernise road-based trade crossings, while the Motihari-Amlekhgunj petroleum pipeline, completed in 2019, became South Asia's first cross-border pipeline of its kind.
That pipeline has since demonstrated its strategic value repeatedly, at one point supplying 100 million litres of diesel to Nepal in a single month during a supply crunch - underscoring how far connectivity infrastructure has moved from the treaty-based transit arrangements of the 1950s-90s toward dedicated, purpose-built cross-border assets.
FIRST BROAD-GAUGE LINE MOTIHARI-AMLEKHGUNJ PIPELINE
Read brief → 03 POWER SECTOR DEEP
Joint Vision Statement on Power Cooperation Power cooperation is one of the oldest formal cooperation areas in the relationship, with joint hydropower projects on shared rivers dating to agreements from the 1950s-60s (including the Koshi and Gandak river treaties) that were, for decades, a source of periodic controversy in Nepal over perceived unequal benefit-sharing given Nepal's vast, largely untapped hydropower potential relative to India's much larger demand.
That dynamic shifted meaningfully from the 2020s, as Nepal began exporting significant power to India's grid rather than only hosting India-funded generation, and the two governments agreed the April 2022 Joint Vision Statement on Power Sector Cooperation - a roadmap covering joint generation, cross-border transmission infrastructure, bi-directional power trade and coordinated grid operations, explicitly reframing Nepal as an power-exporting partner rather than purely a recipient of Indian investment. New hydropower agreements followed, including the 480 MW Phukot Karnali and 669 MW Lower Arun projects, alongside early progress on trilateral India-Nepal-Bangladesh power transactions - a first for regional power trade beyond the traditional bilateral format.
Nepal now earns an estimated NPR 10-15 crore per day through power exports to India, a meaningful and growing revenue stream that has begun to shift the political economy of the hydropower relationship in Nepal's favour compared with earlier decades.
PHUKOT KARNALI 480MW LOWER ARUN 669MW
Read brief → 04 DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP DEEP
India's largest developmental donor to Nepal India has been Nepal's largest development partner for decades, a role rooted in the close ties formalised by the 1950 Treaty and reinforced by geographic proximity and shared infrastructure needs across the open border, well before any of the current large-ticket financing programmes existed.
The High Impact Community Development Projects (HICDP) programme, running since 2003, built a track record of smaller, visible grassroots investments - hospitals, schools, drinking-water systems, rural electrification - designed to generate goodwill at the community level rather than only through large national infrastructure; per-project funding caps were raised to NPR 20 crore in January 2024 to keep pace with rising costs. Larger-ticket Lines of Credit, worth a cumulative $1.65 billion, have funded infrastructure and post-earthquake reconstruction, particularly after the 2015 earthquake. Donation-based welfare assistance has run in parallel since 1994, with India providing 1,009 ambulances and 300 school buses across Nepal over three decades.
Over 551 HICDPs worth NPR 1,249 crore have been completed since 2003, making this one of the most granular, community-facing development partnerships India runs anywhere, distinct in character from the larger sovereign lending India extends to bigger economies.
$1.65BN IN LOCs 551 HICDPs
Read brief → 05 DEFENCE COOPERATION DEEP
Gorkha regiments and honorary General ranks Gorkha recruitment into what became the Indian Army dates to the aftermath of the 1814-16 Anglo-Nepalese War, when the British East India Company, impressed by Gorkha soldiers' fighting record, began recruiting them into colonial regiments - a practice that continued for over a century under British rule.
When India and Britain became independent in 1947, a Tripartite Agreement between India, Nepal and the United Kingdom formally divided the existing Gorkha regiments between the British and Indian armies, and the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship provided the ongoing legal and political foundation for continued Nepali recruitment into the Indian Army thereafter - a security arrangement unique to the India-Nepal relationship among all of India's neighbours. The honorary tradition of each country's Army Chief holding honorary General rank in the other's army grew out of this deep institutional linkage, symbolising the closeness of the two militaries beyond the purely transactional recruitment relationship.
About 32,000 Gorkha soldiers from Nepal currently serve in the Indian Army, supported by Pension Paying Offices in Kathmandu, Dharan and Pokhara managing pensions and welfare for retired soldiers and their families - though recruitment itself has faced new strain since India's 2022 shift to the short-service Agnipath model, which Nepal has been reluctant to fully endorse over concerns about the post-service prospects of soldiers no longer guaranteed a full career and pension.
32,000 GORKHA SOLDIERS HONORARY GENERAL RANK
Read brief → 06 DISASTER RESPONSE DEEP
First responder in Nepal's earthquakes Disaster response became a defined cooperation track after the devastating 25 April 2015 earthquake, Nepal's worst in over 80 years, which killed nearly 9,000 people and destroyed vast amounts of housing and heritage infrastructure - India's speed and scale of response that day set the template for everything that has followed.
India was the first international responder in 2015, deploying 16 National Disaster Response Force teams and 39 Indian Air Force sorties within six hours of the quake, and later announced a $1 billion reconstruction package (including $250 million as an outright grant) to support rebuilding - one of India's largest single disaster-relief commitments to any country. Implementation ran over the following decade, with 50,000 houses, 44 schools and 18 health facilities handed over under the programme by the mid-2020s.
That template repeated after the November 2023 Jajarkot earthquake: India was again the first responder, providing five tranches of relief material and a further reconstruction assistance package worth roughly NPR 1,000 crore - reinforcing disaster response as one of the most consistently reliable and politically uncomplicated pillars of the relationship, largely insulated from the periodic frictions that affect trade, border and treaty issues.
$1BN RECONSTRUCTION PACKAGE JAJARKOT RESPONSE 2023
Read brief → 07 TRADE & INVESTMENT DEEP
India accounts for 64% of Nepal's total trade Trade between India and Nepal has been effectively unrestricted since the 1950 Treaty, which guaranteed reciprocal trade access alongside free movement of people - an arrangement periodically renegotiated through separate Trade Treaties but consistently preserving Nepal's privileged, largely open access to the Indian market, given Nepal's total dependence on India for both trade and transit as a landlocked country.
That structural closeness has deepened steadily as Nepal's economy grew: India's share of Nepal's trade rose from a large but less dominant position in the 1990s-2000s to its current overwhelming share, while Nepal climbed India's own export-destination rankings from 28th in 2014 to 17th-largest by the early 2020s - a rare case of a small neighbouring economy becoming steadily more significant to India's own trade portfolio rather than less. Indian investment followed a similar trajectory, growing from a handful of early ventures into roughly 150 Indian companies operating across manufacturing, banking, insurance, power and tourism by the 2020s.
India now constitutes 64.1% of Nepal's total trade, worth $8.85 billion in FY2022-23 ($8.015 billion in exports to Nepal, $839.62 million in imports from Nepal), and receives 67.9% of Nepal's total exports; Indian firms account for 33.5% of Nepal's total FDI stock (about $670 million) - making India by a wide margin Nepal's single most important economic partner.
$8.85BN TRADE 33.5% OF NEPAL'S FDI
Read brief → 08 EDUCATION & CULTURE DEEP
38,000 scholarship alumni since 2001 Education and cultural exchange trace to the earliest years of the bilateral relationship - the Nepal-Bharat Library, established in Kathmandu in 1951, is one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of Indian cultural diplomacy anywhere, predating almost every other bilateral cultural centre India runs globally.
Scholarship and training programmes scaled up substantially from the 1990s-2000s: the B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation, established in 1991, added a dedicated academic and cultural-exchange vehicle named for Nepal's first elected prime minister, while the Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, opened in Kathmandu in 2007, became the modern hub for language, dance and cultural programming. India's ITEC professional-training programme has run in Nepal since 2007, and a formal annual scholarship scheme has operated since 2001; a Sampark India-Nepal Alumni Network launched in 2021 to keep past scholarship and training recipients connected as a standing goodwill network.
India now provides over 1,500 scholarships annually to Nepali students across medicine, engineering, agriculture, nursing and the arts, with about 38,000 Nepalis having benefited since 2001; over 2,000 Nepali professionals and officials have trained under ITEC since 2007, and the Sampark network has grown to roughly 4,000 registered members - together constituting one of India's largest and longest-running education and cultural exchange relationships with any single country.
38,000 SCHOLARSHIP ALUMNI 1,500 SCHOLARSHIPS/YEAR
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