India-Bangladesh rail project work begins.

Work on the Rs. 973-crore India-Bangladesh railway project has started, six years after the finalisation of the vital rail link between the two neighbours, officials said recently. The decision was taken in the Indo-Bangla Joint Hearing Committee meeting held in the State Guest House recently.

Senior officials of India and Bangladesh held a review meeting here on Wednesday to speed up the work for the new railway project.

“The Bangladesh government has recently started the land acquisition while the same would be initiated in India in December,” India’s external affairs ministry’s joint secretary Ajit Vinayak Gupte said after the meeting.

“Unless requisite lands are acquired, other vital work# cannot be started. By 2018, the new railway project would be functional,” he said.

'Recently, we had a meeting with senior officials of Bangladesh Government and discussed the project in details. A road map was prepared to implement a path-breaking railway project”, Joint Secretary of Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Arun Kumar Gupte told the media after the meeting.

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