NEW DELHI: India and Bangladesh will hold a four-day Director General (DG) level talk from February 16. Several issues including fencing and rise in infiltration attempts are going to be on table, officials said on Sunday.
The delegation-level meeting led by DG Border Security Force (BSF) from Indian side and chief of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) of Bangladesh is taking place for the first time after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on August 5, 2024. They also said that earlier twice such a deliberation was to be postponed for one reason or other.
The meeting between the two sides will be held between February 16 and 19 as part of the 55th edition of these bi-annual talks, as the agenda has been worked upon, the officials said.
The issues related to objections raised by Bangladesh over the construction of “agreed upon” single-row fence at about 92 identified patches covering about 95.8 km of the overall 4,096 km international border between the two countries are expected to be taken up with “prominence”, sources said.
The joint record of discussions called JRD, that is signed by the chiefs of the BSF and the BGB at the end of these talks, will be framed on the basis of these discussions, they said.
Obstruction to the work of fence construction on the Indian side of the borders was underlined last week after India followed by Bangladesh summoned the High Commissioners of the either country in their national capitals.
Bangladesh has expressed “deep concern” over the “activities” of the BSF vis-a-vis fence erection and border killings when they called Indian High Commissioner Pranay Verma in Dhaka over the weekend.
In response to this, India made it clear to the acting Bangladesh High Commissioner Nural Islam in Delhi that all laid down protocols were being followed while constructing the fence as it conveyed its expectation that “all earlier understandings will be implemented by Bangladesh and that there will be a cooperative approach to combating cross-border crimes”.
The Indian side is expected to put across the instances of spiked up infiltration attempts by Bangladeshi nationals across the front post August last year, as these instances are linked to human trafficking and cross-border smuggling.
According to the official data, as many as 1,956 Bangladeshi nationals were apprehended by BSF troops between August and December last year and the five-month period accounted for more than 50 per cent of the interdictions of Bangladeshi nationals on the frontier as the entire year saw 3,474 such apprehensions.