India is renewing its focus on strengthening ties with its southern and northern neighbours, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi virtually attending the BIMSTEC summit hosted by Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on March 30 next and playing host to his Nepalese counterpart Sher Bahadur Deuba from April 1 to 3.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar reached Malé on Saturday for a two-day visit to the Maldives. He will also reach Colombo on Monday for a three-day visit to Sri Lanka.
The Prime Minister is likely to nudge the other BIMSTEC leaders to move fast on regional connectivity initiatives – beginning with easing coastal shipping and trans-border movement of vehicles. The summit will see a master plan for transport connectivity being adopted. The BIMSTEC leaders will also discuss the long-pending Coastal Shipping Agreement and the Motor Vehicle Agreement.
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The BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) is a bloc comprising seven littoral and landlocked countries dependent on the Bay of Bengal – Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
The Motor Vehicle Agreement will pave the way for hassle-free movement of cargo and passenger vehicles across borders in the BIMSTEC region that comprises seven nations, including five of the eight SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) members. The Coastal Shipping Agreement will apply to ship within 20 nautical miles off the coastlines of the BIMSTEC nations and will hence require smaller vessels and involve lesser cost and time.
The challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the uncertainties within the international system that all the BIMSTEC members are facing imparts greater urgency to the goal of taking BIMSTEC technical and economic cooperation to the next level, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, Arindam Bagchi, said in New Delhi. “This is expected to be the main subject of deliberations by the leaders at the summit.”
He said that the BIMSTEC leaders would also discuss the establishment of basic institutional structures and mechanisms of the group.
New Delhi is keen to breathe fresh life into the BIMSTEC as Pakistan has been blocking several connectivity initiatives pushed by India within the SAARC framework.
Modi will have a meeting with Deuba in New Delhi on April 2. This is going to be the Nepalese Prime Minister’s first bilateral visit abroad after becoming Prime Minister in July 2021. He visited India in each of his four earlier stints as the Prime Minister.
The visit is significant as it is happening just days after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Kathmandu.
“This visit is in the tradition of periodic high-level exchanges between the two countries,” said Bagchi, adding: “It would give an opportunity to both sides to review the entire gamut of bilateral relations including development and economic partnership, trade, cooperation in the health sector, power, connectivity, people to people links and other issues of mutual interest.”
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