Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country — landlocked and surrounded entirely by landlocked neighbours, a description it shares only with Liechtenstein. Its capital is Tashkent, and it lies mainly between the Syr Darya (the ancient Jaxartes) to the north-east and the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) to the south-west, the two rivers whose diversion for cotton irrigation shrank the Aral Sea — the reason the visit's environmental deliverable is an afforestation grant for that basin. Uzbekistan declared independence from the Soviet Union on 31 August 1991 and observes 1 September as Independence Day, which in 2026 marked 35 years. For India, Tashkent also carries a specific memory: Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri signed the Tashkent Declaration there on 10 January 1966 with Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, in talks mediated by Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, formally ending the 1965 war; Shastri died in Tashkent hours later, on 11 January 1966. The Prime Minister laid a wreath at the Shastri Memorial, which stands on a street named after Shastri, in the 60th anniversary year of his death — the reason the new Hindi scholarship carries his name. The visit also produced a Letter of Intent on the Buddhist sites of Fayaz Tepa and Kara Tepa near Termez, on the banks of the Amu Darya close to the Afghan border. These were monastery-and-stupa complexes of the Kushan period, roughly the 1st to 3rd centuries CE, on the Silk Road; Fayaz Tepa was excavated in 1963 by the archaeologist L. Albaum and is among Central Asia's largest Buddhist sites — physical evidence of the northward transmission of Buddhism that India now proposes to help restore.

India's constraint in Central Asia is geography, not goodwill: there is no direct land route, because the shortest path runs through Pakistan. India has therefore invested in routes that bypass it. The International North-South Transport Corridor, agreed at St Petersburg on 12 September 2000 by India, Iran and Russia, is a roughly 7,200-km multimodal rail-road-sea route linking the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf to the Caspian and onward to Russia and northern Europe; membership later expanded to include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Oman and Syria, with Bulgaria as observer. India also acceded to the Ashgabat Agreement — concluded on 25 April 2011 by Iran, Turkmenistan, Oman and Uzbekistan for an international transport and transit corridor between Central Asia and the Persian Gulf — joining in February 2018. Politically, the relationship sits inside two multilateral frames: the SCO, and the India-Central Asia Summit, first held virtually on 27 January 2022 with the Presidents of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which the leaders institutionalised as a biennial mechanism supported by an India-Central Asia Secretariat in New Delhi. The joint statement's reaffirmation of the 'Central Asia-India format at the level of Heads of States' refers to that summit track.