India-B’desh border talks to be held in Assam from Dec 22

NEW DELHI: The 51st director general-level border coordination conference between the Border Security Force (BSF) and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) will be held in Guwahati from December 22 to 26, an official statement said.

This is for the first time in four decades that the biannual conference will be held outside Delhi.

The BSF delegation will be led by Director General Rakesh Asthana while the BGB delegation will headed by the force’s chief Major General Md Shafeenul Islam. The conference will focus on addressing and streamlining mechanisms on how to jointly curb various trans-border crimes and timely sharing of information between both the border guarding forces, an official statement said.

There will be deliberations on developmental and infrastructure works, joint efforts for effective implementation of Coordinated Border Management Plan (CBMP) and Confidence Building Measures (CBMs), the statement said.

The aim of the talks is to discuss border related issues, and to enable better coordination between both the forces, it said.

The last BSF–BGB conference was held from September 16 to 19 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

The joint India-Bangladesh guidelines for border authorities – 1975 envisage that there should be frequent contact between the border authorities of the two concerned countries to discuss matters of immediate administrative concern. An Indian delegation under the leadership of Ashwani Kumar, the then Director General of BSF and the Bangladesh delegation under the leadership of Major General Quazi Golam Dastgir, former Director General BDR (now BGB) met in Kolkata on December 2, 1975 for the first time to discuss mutual border problems. Since then, the meetings between DG BSF and DG BGB were held annually alternatively in India and Bangladesh till 1993.