Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will lead a 32-member Bangladesh delegation in the third BIMSTEC Summit to be held in Nay Pyi Taw, the capital of Myanmar on Tuesday (March 4).
She will leave Dhaka on Monday and return on Tuesday after attending the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) summit. The BIMSTEC groups seven South and South-East Asian countries.
A Foreign Ministry press release issued Saturday said, on the side lines of the Summit, the Prime Minister will hold bilateral meetings with her counterparts of the BIMSTEC member-countries including India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan.
Significant will be formal endorsement by the Summit of the permanent secretariat of the grouping in Dhaka.
Prior to the summit, it said, the BIMSTEC ministerial meeting will be held on Monday where State Minister for Foreign Affairs Md Shahriar Alam will lead the country. The Foreign Secretary will also head the Bangladesh delegation in the senior officials' meeting on Sunday.
In the upcoming BIMSTEC Summit, the heads of states/governments will take stock of progress made since the last Summit, exchange views on various aspects of the group's collective engagements and set the future direction of the organisation, the press release added.
The Summit will adopt a declaration and sign three instruments -- memorandum of association on the Establishment of BIMSTEC Permanent Secretariat in Dhaka, BIMSTEC Centre for Weather and Climate in India and BIMSTEC Culture Industries Commission and BIMSTEC Cultural Industries Observatory in Bhutan.
The government has already allotted a premise for the BIMSTEC permanent secretariat in Dhaka. The first Secretary General will be from Sri Lanka, the Foreign Ministry release said.
The BIMSTEC is a regional grouping of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Established in 1997, it held its first and second Summits in 2004 and 2008 in Bangkok and New Delhi respectively.
The main objective of the organisation is to create an enabling environment for rapid economic development through identification and implementation of specific programmes in the 14 identified areas of cooperation. These include trade and investment, energy, transport and communication, tourism, agriculture, environment and disaster management, people-to-people contact, counter-terrorism and transnational crime and climate change. Bangladesh is the Lead Country in areas of trade and investment and climate change.
