November 19, 2002	Tuesday	Ramazan 13, 1423

DHAKA, Nov 18: The finance and planning minister of Bangladesh, M. Saifur Rahman, observed on Sunday that the Saarc countries could not take concrete steps towards alleviating poverty owing to political tensions arising out of mistrust among big partners of the seven-nation forum.

“Concrete steps will be a far cry without cordial relations among the member countries. Efforts for alleviating poverty have so far failed to make any headway in the region,” he said.

“A change in the political mindset is necessary to forge collective efforts ... collective efforts will not be effective unless big countries surrender something for the small ones”, he added.

The minister was addressing the inaugural session of a 3-day meeting of the Independent South Asia Commission on Poverty Alleviation.

The commission was constituted, with Nepal as its convener and Bangladesh as the co-convener, early this year. Its first meeting was held in Kathmandu on March 30-31.

The principal secretary to the Bangladesh premier and joint-convener of the commission, Dr Kamal Uddin Siddiqui, and Saarc Secretary-General Qama Rahim also spoke on the occasion.

The finance minister urged the top political leadership of the region to focus more on the future forgetting the past conflicts, which could be denigrated as small issues compared to battle against poverty.

HYDROELECTRICITY: The state minister for energy and mineral Resources of Bangladesh, Mosharraf Hossain, stressed regional energy cooperation by exploring the hydro electricity potential of Bhutan and Nepal, and natural gas of Bangladesh.

“A regional power grid has tremendous potential in this part of the world by exploring hydro electricity potentiality of Bhutan and Nepal,” the minister told the inaugural session of a two-day meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) Technical Committee that began in Dhaka on Sunday.

“We can also explore opportunities between India and Sri Lanka, and India and Pakistan,” he said, adding that Bangladesh’s natural gas could be another opportunity to explore energy cooperation in the region.