Landlocked Countries of the World: List, Facts and PYQs

A landlocked country is a sovereign state that has no coastline on an ocean or on a sea connected to the ocean. Forty-four countries in the world are landlocked. They must send their exports and imports across a neighbour's territory to reach a port, which makes transport dearer and trade slower, and international law therefore gives them a right of access to and from the sea. The chapter is almost pure factual geography, and examiners ask it as single questions: how many, in which continent, which is the largest, which are doubly landlocked. The same ideas are then tested within India, where nineteen of the twenty-eight states have no coast.

How the landlocked countries are spread

Africa has the most landlocked countries, sixteen, among them Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi and Lesotho. Europe has fourteen, including Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Serbia, Belarus, Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino and the Vatican. Asia has twelve: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. South America has only two, Bolivia and Paraguay. North America, Oceania and Australia have none, because every state there touches the sea. Note the Caspian catch: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan have a shore on the Caspian, but it is the world's largest lake and not connected to the ocean, so these countries are still counted as landlocked.

The superlatives examiners ask

A doubly landlocked country is one whose every neighbour is itself landlocked, so a traveller must cross at least two borders to reach the sea. Uzbekistan is ringed by Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, each landlocked; Liechtenstein lies between Switzerland and Austria. India's own landlocked neighbours are Nepal and Bhutan, both of which depend on Indian ports, chiefly Kolkata and Haldia, for their overseas trade.

How countries become landlocked

Borders change, and so does this list. Bolivia had a coast on the Pacific until it lost the Atacama region to Chile in the War of the Pacific of 1879 to 1883; it still maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca and observes a Day of the Sea every year, and its river trade moves down the Paraguay and Parana. Ethiopia lost its coast in 1993, when Eritrea became independent and took the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Assab. Serbia became landlocked in 2006 when Montenegro separated from it. South Sudan, independent in 2011, is the newest landlocked country in the world. Paraguay, the other landlocked state of South America, reaches the Atlantic through the Parana and Paraguay rivers.

The problems of being landlocked, and the law

Landlocked states pay more for freight, wait longer at borders and depend on the politics of their neighbours; most of them are low-income countries, and the United Nations keeps a separate category of landlocked developing countries with its own programme of action, adopted at Almaty in 2003 and renewed at Vienna in 2014. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 gives every landlocked state the right of access to and from the sea and freedom of transit through the territory of transit states, and the right to sail ships under its own flag; Switzerland, Bolivia and Mongolia all have merchant fleets registered at home. In practice treaties do the work: Nepal and Bhutan use transit agreements with India, and India itself, cut off from Afghanistan and Central Asia by Pakistan, has developed the Chabahar port in Iran as a transit route.

Landlocked states of India

The same idea is tested inside the country. Nine states of India lie on the coast, from west to east: Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal. Gujarat has the longest coastline of any state. Four union territories are coastal: Puducherry, Lakshadweep, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. That leaves nineteen states landlocked, Madhya Pradesh being the largest of them, along with the union territories of Delhi, Chandigarh, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are India's doubly landlocked states, since every state they touch is landlocked as well.