PIB TrackerMultilateral army exercise PRAGATI begins in Meghalaya
India hosts a 12-nation Indian Ocean Region land exercise at Umroi Military Station, focused on counter-terrorism in jungle terrain.
What happened
- Multilateral military exercise PRAGATI 2026 began on 20 May 2026 at Umroi Military Station, Meghalaya, hosted by the Indian Army.
- Contingents from 12 friendly nations arrived and were received by the Indian Army; the opening ceremony was attended by Major General Sunil Sheoran, Additional Director General of Infantry.
- PRAGATI stands for Partnership of Regional Armies for Growth and Transformation in the Indian Ocean Region, framed in the spirit of equality, friendship and mutual respect.
- The exercise runs for two weeks and is built around counter-terrorism operations in semi-mountainous and jungle terrain, with joint planning, tactical-level drills and coordinated operations.
- Indian technology and defence companies are to showcase indigenous equipment alongside the drills under the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative.
- The declared objectives are to enable seamless coordination in joint operations, share expertise through an institutionalised mechanism for exchanging best practices, strengthen defence ties via joint training and cultural exchange, and evolve common concepts for managing and sharing intelligence in a multinational setting.
Background & context
PRAGATI sits within a wider Indian Army practice of hosting and joining named military exercises — the recurring scaffolding through which India builds interoperability with friendly armies. These fall into two families: bilateral exercises (one partner country, a fixed name, usually held alternately in each country) and multilateral exercises (many armies under one banner). PRAGATI belongs to the multilateral family, and its organising idea is geographic rather than bilateral: it gathers the land forces of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) — the maritime neighbourhood stretching from East Africa and the Gulf across South Asia to Southeast Asia — around a shared land-warfare problem set.
The choice of Umroi, near Shillong in Meghalaya, is deliberate. The Northeast offers the semi-mountainous, heavily forested terrain in which much of the region's counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism fighting actually occurs, and the Indian Army's institutional experience in jungle warfare — anchored by the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) at Vairengte, Mizoram — gives India a credible curriculum to share. Hosting at Umroi also fits a longer trend of moving high-visibility military diplomacy into the Northeast, projecting the region as a gateway for India's Act East engagement rather than a sensitive periphery.
The exercise is also an instrument of India's role as a net security provider in the IOR — a posture under which India offers training, capacity-building, disaster response and maritime-domain support to smaller regional states. Read alongside the Atmanirbhar Bharat showcase, PRAGATI doubles as a soft-power and defence-export platform: the same gathering that builds interoperability also puts indigenous Indian military equipment in front of a dozen prospective buyers.
The participant list itself tells a strategic story worth reading slowly. It spans three sub-regions of the Indian Ocean rim: South Asian neighbours (Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives), Southeast Asian states (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Vietnam) and an African island state (Seychelles). Several of these are countries with which India already runs dedicated bilateral army exercises — for instance Surya Kiran with Nepal, Mitra Shakti with Sri Lanka and Garuda Shakti with Indonesia — so PRAGATI layers a multilateral forum on top of those existing bilateral channels rather than replacing them. The absence of the larger extra-regional powers is itself part of the message: this is framed as a gathering of regional armies, organised around the shared geography of the Indian Ocean rather than around any single great-power axis.
It is useful to locate the exercise against the calendar of Indian military diplomacy in this same period. In May 2026 the Raksha Mantri held bilateral defence talks in Seoul with the Republic of Korea's defence minister, and the warship INS Sunayna returned to Kochi after the landmark IOS SAGAR deployment — three distinct strands (a land exercise, ministerial diplomacy and a naval outreach mission) that together sketch how India simultaneously works the army, navy and policy levers of its Indian Ocean strategy. PRAGATI is the land-forces strand of that broader effort.
For Prelims
- Full form: PRAGATI = Partnership of Regional Armies for Growth and Transformation in the Indian Ocean Region. (source-anchored)
- Nature: a multilateral land (army) exercise hosted by the Indian Army — not a naval or air exercise, and not a bilateral one. (source-anchored)
- Venue: Umroi Military Station, Meghalaya (Northeast India). Duration: two weeks, commencing 20 May 2026. (source-anchored)
- 12 participating nations: Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Vietnam. (source-anchored)
- Theme: counter-terrorism operations in semi-mountainous and jungle terrain; joint planning, tactical drills, coordinated operations. (source-anchored)
- India's role: host and lead organiser; the exercise advances India's stance as a net security provider in the IOR. (source-anchored + curator context)
- Atmanirbhar link: Indian defence firms showcase indigenous equipment, tying the exercise to defence indigenisation and exports. (source-anchored)
- Ministry: Ministry of Defence; conducting service is the Indian Army (Infantry, with the Additional Director General of Infantry presiding over the opening). (source-anchored)
How it compares — and what it is NOT. PRAGATI is frequently confused with India's many naval Indian-Ocean initiatives, and the distinction is the examinable point. It is NOT a naval exercise: it does not involve ships or maritime drills. In particular it is distinct from IOS SAGAR (Indian Ocean Ship SAGAR — a single Indian warship, INS Sunayna, deployed across the IOR with foreign crews embarked, which returned to Kochi after a landmark deployment in the same May 2026 cycle), and from the larger MILAN multilateral naval exercise hosted by the Indian Navy at Visakhapatnam, and from SAGAR as a doctrine (Security and Growth for All in the Region, India's maritime-cooperation vision). PRAGATI is the land-warfare counterpart to that maritime family — armies, not navies; jungle and hill counter-terrorism, not sea lanes. It is also NOT a bilateral exercise: it gathers a dozen armies under one banner rather than pairing India with a single partner.
The fuller set it belongs to. To survive "match the pairs" and "how many of these" questions, place PRAGATI inside India's broader exercise calendar. India's recurring bilateral army exercises include, among others, Yudh Abhyas (United States), Indra (Russia), Hand-in-Hand (China), Maitree (Thailand), Mitra Shakti (Sri Lanka), Surya Kiran (Nepal), Garuda Shakti (Indonesia, with the Army), Vajra Prahar and Sampriti (Bangladesh). Multinational/multilateral exercises India joins or hosts include MILAN and Malabar (naval), and the tri-service or specialised formats. PRAGATI's specific niche — an Indian-Army-hosted, IOR-wide, counter-terrorism land exercise — is what makes it distinct from each of these. The triad to keep straight is the level (bilateral vs multilateral), the service (army vs navy vs air vs tri-service), and the domain (land/jungle vs maritime).
Why it matters
The problem PRAGATI addresses is concrete: terrorism and insurgency in the IOR rarely respect borders, and the armies of the region — many of them smaller forces — face common enemies in similar terrain without a common operating language. A two-week exercise that drills joint planning, tactical procedures and intelligence-sharing builds the interoperability that lets these armies act together when a real contingency arrives, instead of meeting for the first time in crisis. The explicit objective of an institutionalised mechanism for exchanging best practices signals that India wants this to be a durable habit of cooperation, not a one-off photo opportunity.
For India specifically, PRAGATI advances three overlapping aims. Strategically, it operationalises the net-security-provider role and deepens defence ties across South and Southeast Asia, reinforcing the Act East policy through the symbolically loaded choice of the Northeast as host. Economically, the Atmanirbhar Bharat showcase converts military diplomacy into a marketing channel for indigenous defence manufacturing, supporting the push to grow defence exports. Diplomatically, convening 12 nations in a framework of "equality, friendship and mutual respect" lets India present an inclusive, non-coercive model of regional security cooperation — a contrast it is keen to draw in a contested neighbourhood. The gap the exercise quietly admits is that such cooperation has historically been ad hoc; the value-add is the move toward institutionalisation.