KARACHI – Bangladesh enjoys very good relations with all regional countries including Pakistan on the basis of mutual respect and interests.
These views were expressed by the High Commissioner of Bangladesh to Pakistan Tarik Ahsan while speaking at a dinner hosted by Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in honour of Karachi based journalists at a local hotel.
The group photo was taken with The High Commissioner of Bangladesh Mr. Tarik Ahsan, at a dinner hosted by Deputy High Commissioner Mr Noor-e-Helal Saifur Rahman, for selected journalists at a local hotel.
He said Pakistan is 10th largest business partner of Bangladesh. Both the countries have very good trade relations.
The Deputy High Commissioner of Bangladesh in Karachi Noor-e-Helal Saifur Rahman while welcoming the guests said that Bangladesh has achieved remarkable progress in socioeconomic development.
Building on these successes, Bangladesh has taken physical infrastructure development as a corner stone of the country’s development policy and ten very big development projects, commonly known as ‘Mega pro-jects’ were undertaken.
He said out of the many mega projects, the Padma Bridge has been the dream project. The estimated project cost of the Padma Bridge project is $3.8 billion. Approximately, 60 percent of
the project has been completed by now and sometime in next year, the bridge will be opened to the public. This project is fully financed by our own resources.
He said the Dhaka Metro Rail project has been under taken to ease the traffic congestion in the city. There will be a total of rail six lines and line number 6 is now being built. This line will carry 60,000 passengers per hour. The project will cost $ 2.7 billion and JICA will provide around 75 percent of the total expenditure as a loan.
He said the Dhaka—Chittagong Elevated Expressway project has been undertaken to connect Chittagong via a quicker road. This Public—Private Partnership Project is one of the highest costing projects of Bangladesh. Establishing a high-speed train service between Dhaka- Chittagong is another priority mega project of the government.
The new line will reduce the existing rail link of 320km to 230km where a train would run at a speed of 200km per hour, he added.
He also briefed about the 68km long Dhaka Elevated Expressway that will connect the Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport with the city with estimated cost of $1.5 billion.
He said presently Bangladesh does not have any deep-sea port.The Payra Deep Sea Port will be the first deep-sea port of Bangladesh and will cost the government $20 billion.
He said govemment’s focus is to raise the electricity production to 24,000MW by 2021, 40,000MW by 2030 and 60,000MW by 2041. The Ruppur Nuclear Power Plant is being built accordingly. The estimated cost of the project is $13 billion and two units will produce 2160MW.
In addition to the above, other mega projects include Bangabandhu Satellite-1, esti- mated cost $250 million which is exclusive of $1 5 million annual servicing cost, he added.
He said foreign remittance continuous to pour in Bangladesh from her expatriate nationals. Since 2012-2013, Bangladesh continues to receive remittance of $14 billion or more each year. And in the first seven months, the figure has been $9.2 billion.
He said that the Bangladesh economy is the 42nd largest economy of world and 3lst largest by purchasing power parity. It has been classified among the ‘Next Eleven Emerging Market Middle Income Economies’ and a “Frontier Market.’ The export target for the 2018-2019 fiscal year has
been $39 billion. Performance so far has been very promising. In the first six months, the totalexports reached $18 billion which is about 15 percent higher in the comparable period.
