From Hooghly to Hormuz: Waterways, Mobility and Connectivity in the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership

Kolkata sits at the origin of a corridor that has carried goods, peoples, and ideas between the Indian subcontinent and the wider world for centuries. The Hooghly, the Ganga, and the Bay of Bengal form the eastern gateway of a maritime network that once connected Bengal's textile trade to the Gulf and the Levant. That historic connectivity is now acquiring new institutional form. The India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership, formalised at the February 26, 2026 Modi-Netanyahu Jerusalem Summit, commits both countries to closer cooperation on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and the I2U2 framework connecting India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States. The eastern seaboard's role in that architecture has received less analytical attention than it warrants. India's Sagarmala Programme is building port-led development along both coastlines. National Waterway 1 links the Hooghly and the Ganga basin. The Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project connects India's northeast to the Bay of Bengal and onward to Southeast Asia. Together these form the inland and coastal infrastructure base on which a more ambitious eastern dimension of the India-Israel partnership could be constructed. IMEC as currently designed designates western Indian ports as principal nodes; the question this roundtable examines is what institutional and infrastructural investment would be required to give Kolkata and the eastern seaboard a structural role in that corridor. Israel brings to this partnership a concentrated record of port development, logistics technology, and maritime security. The Port of Ashdod and the Port of Haifa are among the most efficiently managed in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Israeli firms have contributed to port operations, cold-chain logistics, and maritime domain awareness across multiple geographies. The Jerusalem Summit also formalised the India-Israel Innovation Centre for Agriculture under an ICAR-MASHAV MoU, opening a framework directly relevant to cold-chain and post-harvest technology transfer for eastern India's perishable produce corridors. Kolkata, as India's historic gateway to the Bay of Bengal and the natural hub of eastern trade flows, is the appropriate location to examine what an operationally specific eastern dimension of the Special Strategic Partnership would require.