Bangladesh cabinet yesterday approved the draft of a new
five-year water transit protocol with India, allowing passage of goods to a third country using the common rivers after amending an existing arrangement which expired two months ago, a media report said.
“The proposed amendment suggested, the new PIWTT (Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade) will be for five years instead of three as it was in the past ... The new agreement will (also) allow Bangladesh to use of common channels for trade with other countries, like Nepal and Bhutan,” secretary for coordination and reforms affairs of the cabinet division Nazrul Islam told reporters, PTI reported.
Emerging from the cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, he said the amended protocol kept an option for its automatic renewal if there are no objections from any sides.
“The clause for the transport of goods to a third country would be made more specific in the future ... (but) Nepal and Bhutan were initially targeted under the protocol considering the benefits of both Bangladesh and India,” he said.
Bangladesh and India first signed the protocol in 1972 and renewed the arrangement time and again until its expiry on March 31. Under the protocol, inland vessels of one country can transit through the specified routes of the other country.
Arrested BNP leader’s wife wants him treated in third countryIANS
Shillong, India
Arrested Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) spokesperson Salahuddin Ahmed’s wife said her husband required to be taken to a “third country” for better
treatment.
“My husband is very sick. We will try through legal procedure to take him to some third country for better treatment,” Hasina Ahmed said after meeting him in the high security ward of the Civil Hospital in Indian state Meghalaya’s capital Shillong.
Thanking the local government for providing shelter and treatment to her husband, she said they were yet to finalise on a counsel to assist the family in the court.
Salahuddin’s wife was accompanied by BNP functionaries including party office secretary Abdul Latif Johny who had arrived in Shillong earlier this week.
Salahuddin, who was arrested on May 11 for entering India without papers, expressed his desire to return to Bangladesh.
“Bangladesh is my country. Why will I not return to my own country? I did not commit any crime,” he told journalists.
He was admitted at a Shillong hospital on May 12 after his arrest for travelling without
proper documents.
Doctors attending on him said the senior BNP leader was suffering from kidney and cardiac-related complications for quite some time, the reasons for which he could not be produced in court.
Salahuddin, who faces charges in Bangladesh and against whom the Dhaka unit of Interpol has issued a ‘red corner’ notice, has been booked under Section 14 of the Foreigners’ Act by the Meghalaya police.