Bangladesh has started working on thematic areas for the BCMI corridor linking Bangladesh with China, Myanmar and India.
The report on the study will be presented in the joint working group meeting of the BCMI [Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar] corridor project scheduled to be held in Chittagong in June this year.
Under the BCMI project the four countries in last December in its first meeting in China decided to establish physical connectivity between them.
As part of the physical connectivity a corridor will run from Kunming to Kolkata linking Mandalay in Myanmar as well as Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh.
As a first step the four countries decided to identify realistic and achievable infrastructure projects to boost physical connectivity.
After the first meeting, over the next six months each country was supposed to come up with a joint study report proposing concrete projects and financing modalities before the next meeting of the four nations was held in Dhaka.
“The findings of our study report will be placed in the meeting in Chittagong,” chairman of the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS) Munshi Faiz Ahmad said.
“The ideas of each country will be shared in June and it will be discussed at different levels and we hope to synthesize all the national plans to get a single plan in Kolkata meeting in December,” Munshi said.
Energy, connectivity, investment and finance, trade in goods and service, poverty alleviation and social and human development, sustainable development, and people to people contact are the thematic areas where all the countries are working.
The foreign ministry, BIISS and Centre for Policy Dialogue are conducting the study in Bangladesh.
Former Bangladesh ambassador to China Munshi said earlier Kunming, Mandalay, Dhaka and Kolkata were the focus cities in the BCIM corridor initiative.
“But in the last Kunming meeting, Dhaka had successfully included Chittagong as the second focus city in Bangladesh,” he said.
“The route is yet to be decided.”
Chinese Ambassador Li Jun at a press briefing a week back said there was a suggestion to start the route from Kunming via Mandalay in Myanmar and Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh before it enters Kolkata in India.
He said now the four governments were making their national plan to complement the economic corridor and find out the priorities of each country.
“The four countries will show the list of their priorities in the building of the economic corridor and in this June they will hold a meeting in Chittagong and in the end of this year the third round of meeting will be held in India,” the Chinese ambassador said.
An official of the foreign ministry said the economic corridors are not mere transport connections along which people and goods move rather they link the supply and demand to the markets of the countries involved.
The corridor will integrate the economies, enhance competitiveness and harness potential, he said. “It will also aid to strike a balance of power in the region.
He, however, cautioned that closer integration will also bring some problems for the countries.
“In integrated Europe, if one country falls into trouble it affects other countries. Similarly, in a closely integrated BCIM system, no country will be immune to the problems of other countries,” he said.
About the use of currency, he said Chinese Renminbi is being increasingly used to settle trade transactions.
In the future, Renminbi could be an anchor currency in the region, he added.
