Bangladesh and India are going to sign a border management agreement tomorrow with a view to bringing down incidents of killing and crime along the border.
The agreement styled Coordinated Border Management Plan (CBMP) is expected to be signed during Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram's 24-hour visit to Dhaka.
The Indian home minister is due to arrive here today at 9:00pm. He will hold a meeting at the home ministry with his Bangladesh counterpart Sahara Khatun tomorrow at 10:30am. The talks will be followed by the signing of the deal.
Chidambaram is also scheduled to call on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Foreign Minister Dipu Moni.
Meanwhile, two joint secretaries of Indian home ministry -- Kamal Kanti Mittal and Shambhu Singh -- arrived in Dhaka yesterday to finalise the proposed deal and other issues to be discussed between the home ministers.
"We are going to sign the agreement with a hope to stop killing of innocent Bangladeshis at the borders. It will enable a mechanism which will help the border guards of both the countries exercise maximum restraint," a senior home ministry official told The Daily Star yesterday.
The proposed agreement also aims at stopping smuggling of arms and narcotics, activities of extremists and terrorists, insurgency and human trafficking. Both the countries have already identified nodal points for coordinated action against individuals, touts or agents involved in human trafficking, said the ministry officials concerned.
Bangladesh will hand over a list of vulnerable areas along the Indo-Bangladesh border to the Indian home minister. As per the new agreement expected to be signed tomorrow, border guards of both the countries will exchange information on the vulnerable areas to ensure joint patrolling in a coordinated way. None of the troops will cross the border during patrol.
Officials of home and foreign affairs ministries said the two countries will finalise the border related deals before the Indian Prime Minister's visit to Bangladesh.
Chidambaram's visit is apparently a part of a series of high profile visits to Bangladesh. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already announced to visit Bangladesh on September 6-7 while Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi and External Affairs Minister SM Krishna already visited Bangladesh and had talks with the leadership here.
Source : The Daily Star
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