India and Bangladesh have been good neighbors since the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. The sharing of common history, heritage, and cultural background strengthens their bond. Both the countries have signed various agreements and MoUs so far, be it financial, geographical or cultural. One of the oldest India-Bangladesh agreements was signed in 1974 that was finally implemented during the last visit of PM Modi to Bangladesh, exchanging 162 enclaves in June 2016. And now both countries announced 22 more agreements for enhancing and intensifying their political and financial collaboration at the joint conference held in New Delhi.
After a long time, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina came to visit India recently on Saturday the 8th of April and PM Modi personally reached the airport to receive her. PM Modi assures Bangladesh to fulfill the commitment and also to solve the problem of Teesta water sharing shortly. He also praised Bangladesh for its zero tolerance policy on terrorism.
They came to agree on various aspects including defense, civil nuclear cooperation, infrastructure, and development. PM Modi announces 4.5 billion line of credit to Bangladesh for the infrastructure and development projects. And another credit line of 500 million dollars for aiding Dhaka to purchase military hardware, extending the total credit line to over 8 billion dollars over the past few years. According to sources, Bangladesh’s defense budget is about 2.8 billion dollars that makes fighter jets, like MiG-35, unaffordable to them. So Dhaka is going to use this money to buy Russian MiG-35 fighter Jets and some spare parts of MiG-29S fighters. According to the estimation of Bangladesh Government, the GDP growth of Bangladesh is expected to be at 7.2 percent this fiscal year while, last year, it was 7.1 percent.
According to a Bangladesh Government document, India would help Bangladesh in a number of projects ranging from civil nuclear co-operation and liquefied natural gas power plants to railways, ports and in establishing of special economic zones.
Experts see this collaboration between both the countries as an effort of India to keep away China from its neighbors like Bangladesh as China is continuously pledging huge amount of money to the South Asian countries that seems suspicious.
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