South Asia is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population, yet it is one of the least connected regions in terms of people actually moving across borders.
Centuries of shared history, culture and language haven’t translated into easy travel between neighbors. Instead, visas, political tensions and diplomatic uncertainty still decide who gets to cross and who doesn’t.
People want to travel for the usual reasons: school, medical care, business or just to see family. But in South Asia, borders aren’t simply lines on a map — they’re high, impenetrable walls. That hurts a region that, more than most, needs economic cooperation, freedom of movement and cultural connection to thrive.
While other parts of the world are knitting themselves closer together, as seen in the European Union and ASEAN, South Asia is stuck on something more basic: getting to the country next door can be harder than flying halfway around the world.
For ordinary people, how far you can travel often has nothing to do with distance. It comes down to the state of diplomatic relations on any given day. Students, researchers, tourists, patients and businesspeople all get caught in the middle of political decisions over which they have no control or say.
Bangladesh and India show how fast border situations can shift. After Bangladesh’s political upheaval in August 2024, India sharply cut back on Bangladeshi tourist visas, keeping the door open mainly only for medical cases.
A trip to India, once routine for many Bangladeshis, became an ordeal. It took almost two years for India to announce that tourist visas for Bangladeshis would resume on June 28, 2026 — a move welcomed regionally as a concrete step toward mending ties.
Bangladesh and Pakistan tell a quieter, similarly stuck story. More than 50 years after 1971, when East Pakistan fought a war of independence from West Pakistan, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh, old wounds still shape ties.
Visa services have never shut down outright, but mobility has been restricted for decades — confined mostly to official, business or medical travel, with tourism barely registering. Two nations bound by history interact far less than their geography would suggest.
India and Pakistan are the starkest case. Since Partition in 1947, persistent wars and security crises have curtailed cross-border travel. The situation worsened after the Pahalgam attack in April 2025, when India suspended visa services for Pakistanis and revoked most visas already issued. Travel between the two countries has remained largely frozen since.
India and Afghanistan have similarly closed borders. When the Taliban seized power in August 2021, India suspended regular visa access for Afghan citizens. Access eased slightly in 2025, when India introduced e-visas for select categories — business, medical and students — a small but meaningful opening.
The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is as blocked as any in the region. Security concerns, armed conflict and diplomatic friction have created serious obstacles for Afghan nationals, with rights groups documenting mass deportations and tightening restrictions on families seeking refuge after the Taliban’s takeover.
Elsewhere, the barriers look different but amount to the same thing. Sri Lanka’s 2024 attempt to outsource its visa processing raised costs and entangled travelers in red tape before the Supreme Court suspended the deal, with the fallout still being sorted out.
Bhutan takes a different approach with its Sustainable Development Fee — not a visa restriction exactly, but a financial impediment to movement. Across much of the region, the size of your bank account increasingly decides how freely you can move.
Nepal and the Maldives remain exceptions, with more relaxed arrangements than most neighbors, though even these rest on one-off bilateral deals rather than any shared regional framework.
The bigger picture hasn’t changed: South Asians, more often than not, find it easier to fly somewhere distant than to visit the country next door. This isn’t just an inconvenience: limited mobility erodes academic collaboration, tourism and economic opportunity.
At the same time, governments rarely feel the cost directly. It’s the students pursuing education, the patients seeking urgent care, the families split by a border and the entrepreneurs trying to reach new markets who pay the price of the restrictions.
To be sure, building a more connected region doesn’t mean tearing down borders or ignoring genuine security concerns. But walls that unnecessarily prevent students, researchers and businesspeople from crossing borders for useful purposes are in nobody’s interest.
How much longer will South Asia let short-sighted border policy keep its neighbors strangers?
Meherun Nessa is a student at Jahangirnagar University in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
