Bay of Bengal: Bangladesh won the legal battle twice. Why can’t it cash it in?

In 2012, it was against Myanmar. In 2014, it was against India. Two international tribunals ruling on maritime boundaries gave Bangladesh rights over about 118,813 square kilometres in the Bay of Bengal under the 2012 ITLOS and 2014 PCA awards, including a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

That zone is almost as big as Bangladesh itself. Policymakers said this win opened up a blue economy. Economists argued the ocean might one day matter as much to growth as agriculture does.

Now, more than ten years later, the ocean economy still contributes only a little more than 3% of Bangladesh's GDP — on the last official estimate, which is now a decade old. Most of it comes from three long-established sectors: fisheries, shipping, and salt.

No government has commissioned a national ocean accounting since 2014–15, and the absence of a current figure is itself part of the story. The rest of the 26 possible blue-economy sectors identified in Bangladesh remain largely undeveloped. The real question is not whether Bangladesh has an ocean, but why that ocean still does not pay rent.

The economics of an underused asset

Imagine the Bay of Bengal as a piece of capital sitting idle on Bangladesh's balance sheet. Marine fisheries bring in about 15–16% of Bangladesh's total fish production. Almost all of it comes from small boats and shallow water; industrial deep-sea operations barely exist.

Offshore oil and gas exploration is stuck at its 2014 level. Sangu, which produced from 1996 until it was shut down in 2013, remains the only offshore gas field Bangladesh has ever brought into production.

The gap is starkest in the numbers — and the best comparable data available, most of it from the middle of the last decade, still tells the story. China's marine economy grew at an annual average of 8.1% between 2011 and 2015, reaching $989.3 billion in 2015 — roughly 9.6% of national GDP and employing an estimated 35.9 million people.

Australia, with a marine jurisdiction larger than its landmass, drew $74.2 billion from its ocean industries in 2013–14 alone, split mainly between offshore oil and gas and tourism, and was projected to reach $100 billion a year by 2025.

Bangladesh's comparable figure — roughly $6.2 billion, about 3.33% of GDP as of 2014–15 — is not just modest. It is a rounding error next to what littoral neighbours are extracting from waters no richer than the Bay of Bengal. Even small island states outperform proportionally: Seychelles, a nation smaller than a single Dhaka district, issued the world's first sovereign blue bond in 2018 and built a dedicated Ministry of the Blue Economy years before Bangladesh assembled its first coordination cell.

The opportunity cost is not abstract. Each year that Bangladesh delays industrialising fishing, expanding aquaculture beyond tiger shrimp monoculture, or building real deep-sea port capacity at Sonadia or Matarbari, it is effectively subsidising competitors who move faster. An asset that Bangladesh does not extract, process, or export is not merely idle — it is depreciating. That is not just bad economics. It is a quiet surrender of sovereignty.

Governance, political and infrastructural bottlenecks

The gap is not a resource problem. It is a governance problem, and it runs on three tracks simultaneously.

Governmental fragmentation: maritime affairs in Bangladesh are currently split across the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, the Ministry of Shipping, and the Energy and Mineral Resources Division — five bureaucracies with overlapping jurisdiction and no single authority empowered to force coordination.

The Blue Economy Cell, created in January 2017 under the Energy and Mineral Resources Division, has a coordination mandate but no legal teeth to compel other ministries to comply, no independent budget line, and no enforcement power. A parliamentary standing committee recommended upgrading it into a full authority; the recommendation was never acted on.

Compare that with South Africa's Integrated Coastal Management Act and Operation Phakisa: Oceans Economy, which gave its blue-growth programme actual statutory force, or Seychelles' dedicated ministry with cabinet-level authority. Bangladesh must answer the basic governance question that other countries settled years ago: who is legally and financially responsible when a blue-economy target is missed?

Sequencing is required: an empowered authority instead of five overlapping ones; a legally binding Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management Policy instead of a wish-list plan; systematic marine spatial planning before, not after, industrial expansion; and a diplomatic posture that treats blue-economy partnerships as investment rather than aid.

Political short-termism: blue-economy investments such as deep-sea survey vessels, port infrastructure, and marine research institutes take a decade or more to yield returns. Successive five-year plans get the vocabulary of "sustainable ocean growth" right, but budget allocations consistently favour land-based, visible projects over long-horizon maritime capacity building. The flurry of activity that followed the 2012 and 2014 verdicts has long since cooled into routine paperwork.

Infrastructural deficits: Bangladesh still lacks a dedicated maritime survey satellite programme, and its last comprehensive seabed mineral assessment dates to 1994. Chattogram Port alone handles 80% of the country's $78 billion annual overseas trade, while newer facilities at Payra and Matarbari remain under-built relative to demand.

Bangladesh-flagged vessels now carry under 14% of the country's seaborne cargo, meaning foreign vessels take the lion's share of freight revenue that could otherwise stay domestic. Without baseline data, private capital — whether foreign or domestic — has no way to price risk in deep-sea fisheries, offshore energy, or marine biotechnology, so it simply does not show up.

Sustainability is not the enemy of growth — it is the precondition

The problem starts with a false trade-off: that using the ocean and protecting it must pull against each other. They do not. The World Bank identifies three main dangers to the future of the ocean economy: overfishing, uncontrolled coastal development, and pollution — the same pressures that erode the resource base long-term investors need before they will commit capital.

The mangroves and saltwater grasses in the Sundarbans are among the largest blue-carbon stores in South Asia, sequestering carbon at a scale Bangladesh has never measured. Bangladesh has not added that store to its climate-change plans, let alone turned it into money. Unmanaged tourism is already putting pressure on St Martin's Island, the country's only coral island, and risks destroying the very thing the tourism industry depends on.

A blue economy, properly defined, is not a constraint bolted on to growth. It is the only version of growth that does not exhaust itself within a decade. Sustainability is not the brake. It is the steering wheel.

The geopolitics we keep avoiding

There is a third front Bangladesh has been strangely unwilling to contest, despite the effort it spent winning the boundary cases in the first place. The Bay of Bengal is a busy shipping corridor linking South Asia to Southeast Asia, and an increasingly contested one, as littoral states expand their ocean economies and China extends its Belt and Road footprint into the Bay.

Bangladesh has a stronger claim than any of its neighbours to a leading role in shaping how the Bay is governed — it is the only major littoral state there without a standing strategic rivalry to manage.

That role requires infrastructure and diplomacy Bangladesh has not built. Groups such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association, BIMSTEC, and the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium are precisely the forums in which middle powers pool survey capacity, coordinate maritime domain awareness, and bargain collectively rather than bilaterally.

Bangladesh belongs to all three. It rarely sets their agendas. China's engagement in the Bay, meanwhile, is strategic rather than charitable: it arrives with loans and an expectation of reciprocity. If Bangladesh does not grow its blue economy and its own negotiating capacity, it risks becoming a venue where others make money rather than a country that makes its own choices.

Bangladesh should not be a bystander in its own waters. It should be a negotiator, a rule-setter, and a beneficiary.

What would cashing in actually require?

None of this demands a miracle. Sequencing is required: an empowered authority instead of five overlapping ones; a legally binding Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management Policy instead of a wish-list plan; systematic marine spatial planning before, not after, industrial expansion; and a diplomatic posture that treats blue-economy partnerships as investment rather than aid.

Bangladesh fought hard for its share of the Bay of Bengal and won. Tribunal rulings were never the finish line. They were the opening bid. A decade later, the ocean still waits for Bangladesh to show up and make its case.

The sea is not waiting forever. Neither are our competitors.

Sketch: TBS

Murad Mia is an undergraduate student in the Department of Economics at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet.

Omite Ashraf is an MPhil researcher in the Department of Oceanography at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.