The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade — approximately 20 million barrels per day — and recent disruptions to transit through the strait have exposed a vulnerability at the heart of globalisation: modern global supply chains are heavily dependent on maritime chokepoints, and the consequences of disruption at any single chokepoint spread rapidly to energy supply, freight rates, industrial production, and food security. This highlights the need to improve the resilience of global supply chains and to develop a network of multimodal corridors capable of shifting cargo between sea, rail, and road.
The ancient Silk Roads were an interconnected multimodal network of caravan trails, river routes and ports. These routes survived even as maritime networks expanded, demonstrating that terrestrial connectivity and maritime connectivity were complementary. Marco Polo’s journeys evoke a similar world in which movement across Eurasia involved repeated changes of mode, geography and political jurisdiction.
In subsequent centuries, the centre of gravity shifted towards the sea. The rise of oceanic commerce and the age of sail and steam followed, giving rise to an international maritime order based on freedom of navigation. Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609) articulated the principle of freedom of the seas, and centuries later, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which came into force in 1994, codified an extensive legal framework for navigation, including transit passage through international straits. This maritime order, combined with a stable economic order, generated enormous prosperity. Because the world took secure maritime corridors for granted, it adopted just-in-time (JIT) inventory management. The JIT approach increased business efficiency but also heightened supply-chain criticality and concentrated systemic risks around chokepoints such as Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, and Malacca; exploiting these vulnerabilities as economic weapons may become an increasingly common tactic. The Hormuz crisis highlights that UNCLOS cannot, by itself, guarantee transit through international straits — and shows how commercial traffic and global supply chains are affected when security conditions deteriorate.
Alternatives to Chokepoint Dependence
The ‘Malacca dilemma’, coined by former Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2003, reflects China’s fear that rivals could blockade the narrow waterway during a conflict, with severe economic consequences for the country. Over the past two decades, China, under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has constructed a vast multimodal network of railways, highways, pipelines, ports, and industrial parks, stretching across Central Asia and the Indian Ocean rim, and into Europe and Africa — building supply-chain resilience and a multimodal relief valve for the Malacca Strait.
China’s network is now a model for others, as the world beyond China faces its own supply-chain shocks, the norm of a rules-based maritime order frays, and unimpeded passage becomes increasingly a function of power rather than law. In this environment, India — wedged between a volatile Strait of Hormuz and a congested Strait of Malacca — can no longer outsource its economic security, and must instead build it with trusted partners, by proactively weaving a network of multimodal corridors and deepening Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) transport links.
Building India’s Multimodal Corridor Network
Several corridors exist in plan and in partial form. The India Middle East Economic Corridor (IMEC) should be viewed not merely as a trade corridor but as a resilience corridor. Its maritime links from India to the Arabian Gulf, combined with rail connectivity towards Europe and proposed digital, electricity and hydrogen links, can create a diversified Asia–Middle East–Europe supply-chain architecture.
The International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), by combining sea, rail and road links between India, Iran, the Caspian region, Russia and Europe, offers an alternative to routes dependent on Suez and, in some circumstances, Hormuz.
To the east, Galathea Bay on Great Nicobar Island can become a strategic gateway to the Bay of Bengal and the eastern Indian Ocean. The deep-water transhipment hub can strengthen India’s role in regional shipping and reduce dependence on transhipment centres outside India. It should be conceived as a network node connecting the Bay of Bengal ports with global shipping
The deep-sea port at Matarbari in Bangladesh and the Kaladan multimodal transport link in Myanmar, along with the proposed international transhipment hub at Galathea Bay, represent a strategic reimagining of Bay of Bengal cargo flows. Matarbari and Kaladan together offer a gateway to India’s northeastern states and BIMSTEC hinterlands. Galathea Bay sits astride the Malacca Strait’s western mouth, allowing transhipment to occur on Indian soil rather than at distant regional hubs. When connected to the Trilateral Highway and the India-Myanmar-Thailand network, these ports become the maritime anchors of the ASEAN-India multimodal grid. Parallel to this, the Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade (PIWTT) with Bangladesh can transform the riverine arteries of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta into a low-carbon, resilient economic corridor, linking Nepal, West Bengal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Assam, and Northeast India.
Taken together, these initiatives — IMEC, Kaladan, INSTC, Matarbari, the Galathea transhipment hub, PIWTT inland waterways, and the broader BIMSTEC-ASEAN connectivity master plans — form a strategic portfolio of economic corridors for building supply-chain resilience for countries in the region.
The Chinese corridor network has given China a margin of strategic comfort that India and its partners do not possess. Operationalising IMEC, INSTC, and Galathea Bay is foundational to a twenty-first-century multimodal silk web. BIMSTEC’s Master Plan for Transport Connectivity already covers roads, railways, ports, inland waterways, multimodal transport, and trade facilitation, while the 2025 BIMSTEC Agreement on Maritime Transport Cooperation adds an important maritime layer. ASEAN’s transport architecture similarly links highways and railways with seaports, airports, dry ports, and economic zones. The strategic task is to connect these initiatives, rather than treat them as separate projects. IMEC, INSTC, Galathea Bay, PIWTT, BIMSTEC, and ASEAN connectivity can together form a Multimodal Economic Corridor Network across the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
From Infrastructure to Interoperability
The value of these multimodal economic corridors, however, will depend on operationalisation. Harmonised customs, interoperable digital documentation, reliable rail services, efficient ports, and predictable border procedures all matter for containers to move seamlessly — and three priorities are essential to achieving this.
First, infrastructure must be interoperable: ports, railways, waterways, roads, logistics parks, and digital platforms should operate as components of one corridor. Second, institutional resilience must accompany physical infrastructure, through customs harmonisation, common data standards, mutual recognition of documents, coordinated border management, insurance mechanisms, and emergency protocols. Third, governments and industry should pre-plan contingency routing for energy, food, critical minerals, and manufactured goods, in case Hormuz, Suez, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, or another chokepoint becomes unavailable.
Modern globalisation traded much of that redundancy in transport networks for the efficiency of oceanic mass transport. The Hormuz crisis reminds us of the cost of that concentration. The answer is not deglobalisation, nor abandonment of UNCLOS and freedom of navigation. It is to complement the rules-based maritime order with a resilient multimodal economic architecture. For India, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the opportunity lies in building connectivity that can move more cargo while keeping it moving when preferred routes fail. The ancient Silk Roads were resilient because they were networks. The economic corridors of the future must be networks too.
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