GUWAHATI (Assam, India): India and Bhutan have formally demarcated their border by signing the final maps 45 years after the process of settling the boundary started, officials said on Wednesday.

The two countries will erect pillars and use markers to define the 700-kilometre (435-mile) frontier, which is currently unfenced and separated by concrete pillars in only some places.

“This is indeed a landmark agreement as the two countries mutually agreed to demarcate the border without any differences in opinion,” a Bhutanese foreign ministry official told AFP by telephone from the capital Thimphu.

India's ambassador to Bhutan, Sudhir Vyas, and the Himalayan kingdom's secretary for international boundaries, Dasho Pema Wangchuk, signed the agreement at a meeting in Thimphu on Tuesday. “This line is not a border, it is a marker of friendship between our two countries,” Vyas was quoted as saying by Bhutan's national newspaper Kuensel.

Bhutan shares borders with the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh in the east, Sikkim in the west, and Assam, where Guwahati is located, and West Bengal in the south. The Himalayan nation also shares a border with China.

The demarcation process began in 1961 with India sketching the boundary maps.

But the process has taken time because many pillars were either destroyed or in the wrong place, India's surveyor general M. Gopal Rao told the newspaper.

Bhutan has yet to fully demarcate its 470 kilometre (290 miles) long border with China, and the two countries are discussing the issue.

In September, India said it planned to more than double its 5,000 troops along the border to prevent insurgents fighting Indian rule in its remote northeast from setting up bases in the kingdom of 600,000 people.

In 2003, the Bhutanese military launched a crackdown to drive out Indian guerrilla outfits staging hit-and-run attacks on Indian targets from its soil.

The Buddhist nation has assured New Delhi that it will not give refuge to rebels fleeing India. It says it now has no Indian militants camps on its soil.—AFP