Teesta deal will surely be signed
Says Dipu Moni
Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni last night said her country "is sure" that the Teesta water-sharing agreement with India will materialise.
"We are sure the agreement will materialise. The people of Bangladesh are also optimistic about it," she told reporters on the sidelines of a function at Kolkata, where she was conferred with the Mother Teresa International Award for excellence in social work.
"Water is a very important issue. People of Bangladesh also want this agreement to be signed. Bilateral relation between India and Bangladesh is a deep-rooted one. Teesta agreement will be signed soon," she said on arriving here on a two-day private visit.
The agreement had to be scrapped during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Dhaka last September following last minute objection by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to the quantum of water to be given to Bangladesh.
Moni said both the countries were forging ahead to strengthen the bilateral relation and fulfilling the agreements signed between the two countries during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Dhaka last year and Sheikh Hasina's trip to Delhi in January 2010.
She said a joint commission headed by foreign ministers of the two countries was also formed as part of the institutional mechanism to pursue and monitor the agreements signed during the visits of the two prime ministers, and the first meeting of the commission would be held in New Delhi on May 7.
"India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is slated to visit Dhaka on May 6, when he would attend the concluding function of the year-long celebrations of Rabindranath Tagore's 150th birth anniversary and meet Hasina," Dipu Moni said.
She said she herself would go to New Delhi the next day [today] to meet her Indian counterpart S M Krishna and hold talks on the entire gamut of bilateral ties.
"The Indo-Bangladesh relation at this moment is at its best, like that in 1971," Dipu Moni said.
To a question, she said there was no scheduled meeting between Hasina and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Dipu Moni said she felt honoured receiving an award named after Mother Teresa which was also conferred on Sheikh Hasina in 2006.
She also visited the Mother House, the global headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity yesterday.
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