Nepal's Home Minister, Sudan Gurung, will travel to New Delhi on October 12,2026, to attend the first-ever BIMSTEC Home Ministers' Meeting on October 13. Officials at the Home Ministry and the Nepali Embassy in New Delhi confirmed the trip. It will be Gurung's first foreign visit since he was reappointed home minister in June 2026.
Home ministers from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand are expected to take part. A meeting of home secretaries is expected to come before the ministers' session.
The exact agenda has not been made public as of now. Existing BIMSTEC security work covers terrorism, organized crime, human trafficking, drug trafficking, cybersecurity, maritime security and disaster management.
BIMSTEC was set up in 1997. At the Fourth Summit in Kathmandu in August 2018, leaders called for closer cooperation among law-enforcement, intelligence and security agencies and decided to create a Home Ministers' mechanism. That meeting has never been held before. The Sixth Summit in April2025 welcomed the mechanism and asked for the first meeting to be held soon.
The ministers' meeting builds on earlier work. On July 16, 2026, BIMSTEC national security chiefs met in New Delhi under India's National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval. They discussed terrorism, organized crime, cybersecurity, maritime security, energy security, connectivity and disaster management.
Gurung is expected to hold separate talks with counterparts on the sidelines, including India's Home Minister, Amit Shah. These meetings have not been officially confirmed and no agreement has been announced.
Nepal and India share an open border, which makes cooperation on trafficking, drug smuggling, organized crime and information sharing especially important. Nepal also has a long link to the new forum, since the decision to create it was taken in Kathmandu.
The meeting's value will depend on its results. BIMSTEC has had trouble turning summit decisions into working institutions, and this one took eight years. The key question is whether the seven countries adopt concrete steps, such as action plans or regular information sharing and not only general statements.
Crimes such as trafficking, drugs and online fraud cross borders, and disasters such as floods and cyclones hit several countries in the region. Better coordination could affect ordinary people, but nothing has been agreed yet.
