Bangladesh Set to Host High-level Talks between BSF and Its Border Force from Sept 13

A six-day Director General-level meeting between Bangladeshi and Indian border forces will be held here from September 13 during which the two sides are expected to discuss a host of issues related to crimes at their frontiers and other security challenges, officials said. The biannual talks between Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) director-general Major General M Shafeenul Islam and his newly appointed Indian counterpart Border Security Force (BSF) Rakesh Asthana will take place at BGB's Pilkhana headquarters.

The BGB's operations director Lieutenant Colonel Fayzur Rahman said Bangladesh always laid high importance to violence on the borders. The BGB operations director said cross-border smuggling particularly drug smuggling, construction of different structures like barbed wire fencing and other installations, toxic water flow from upstream India were others issues to be discussed in the meeting.

Border killing is an important issue for us, the state-run BSS news agency quoted a BGB official as saying. The official said that until August this year, 33 Bangladeshis were killed along Bangladesh-India frontiers. Rahman, however, described the upcoming meeting as a routine one when the two sides would discuss ways to improve relations between the two border forces, alongside other issues of mutual interest.

Diplomatic sources suggested cattle smuggling, fake currency business and human trafficking are likely to be major issues for the BSF side during the talks. They said alongside the BSF sector commanders, officials of India's Narcotics Control Bureau and representatives of External Affairs Ministry and other agencies concerned would accompany Asthana in Dhaka.

Officials said the BGB and the BSF chiefs were likely to sign a joint record of discussion at the end of the talks, the 50th at the level of director-general since 1975. The DG-level talks between the BGB and the BSF started in 1975 and are generally held twice a year, once in Dhaka and once in Delhi for the management of porous 4,096 km long frontiers.

The BGB-BSF director general-level talks are set to be held days ahead of a planned foreign minister-level Joint Consultative Commission (JCC) meeting using virtual media to be hosted by Dhaka later this month.

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