BIMSTEC states urged to share energy resources for sustainable growth

News Desk

Speakers in the concluding day of international conference on integrated power management issue has said the political unrest of this region and non-cooperation attitude of the member states of BIMSTEC countries have failed to make a common platform to enhance cooperation among the member states of South and Southeast Asian region.

They urged the member countries of BIMSTEC to work together to achieve sustainable growth through sharing of available energy resources in the South and Southeast Asian region.

They said that the countries could solve their energy problem through using the hydro potential of the member countries of this region.

“We need to sort out the real problem including the political problems of this region to achieve our economic goal,” the speakers said mentioning the regional conflicts of these areas.

We are working here more than 20 years to establish South Asian Regional Initiative (SARI) and other platforms’ but we failed to achieve our common goal which is economic development, we failed to do any collective work we could be able to make some bi-lateral agreements here.

Speakers discussed the political unrest of this region, mentioned the non-cooperation attitude of the member states countries here and said “the BIMSTEC countries have failed to make a common platform to enhance cooperation among the member states,” they said.

It said despite having a huge demand of electricity and sources of hydro potential in Nepal and Myanmar, it failed to make any progress rather Bangladesh achieve 95 per cent success in this regard.

The two day long conference organized by the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) has concludes here on Wednesday with a promise to work on connecting around 3,000 kilometre-long power grid from Myanmar-Thailand – India.

BIMSTEC Secretary General M Shahidul Islam delivered the concluding speech while Mission Director of USAID, Bangladesh, Derrick S Brown spoke. Experts from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand took part in the discussion.

Reference: Observer Bd