Bangladesh, India and China have finalised their strategy paper on the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Forum for Regional Cooperation (BCIM) and shared with each other.
“Bangladesh, India, China have already finalised their papers. In fact India shared their paper last week with us. We are still waiting to hear from Myanmar,” Foreign Secretary M Shahidul Haque said at a seminar held at MCCI auditorium Thursday.
The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor is the initiative of the four countries to connect the growth centres located between Kolkata and Kunming.
The secretary said in the second BCIM joint study meeting held in Cox’s Bazar in 2014, all countries decided to put in their own strategy.
He said he had a consultation with Indian Foreign Secretary S Jaisankar early this month in India on the issue.
“This is one of the issues that was on the agenda and I had a consultation with him and they are waiting for the right moment to call a meeting on BCIM,” he said.
India agreed to host the third BCIM meeting, he added.
“This meeting will be extremely important because that is where the four countries would take decisions and adopt a framework for giving life to the corridor. The corridor will eventually be linked up with bigger Chinese proposal of One Belt One Road,” the secretary said.
Another Foreign Ministry official said, a high-powered Chinese delegation would visit Dhaka next week to discuss how to move the initiative forward.
The delegation will have meeting with officials of the Foreign Ministry and Centre for Policy Dialogue as both of them are working closely to materialise the initiative, he said.