Asia
SAARC car rally flagged off
Dhaka | March 15, 2007 2:23:24 PM IST
Bangladesh's Chief Adviser to the Caretaker Administration Fakhruddin Ahmed on Thursday formally flagged off the SAARC car rally, expressing hope that the rally would help turn South Asia into a common tourism destination. "The SARRC should increase its efforts to promote the region as a common tourist hub," the chief adviser said inaugurating the seven-nation rally in the run up to the 14th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, scheduled to be held in New Delhi early next month. Fakhruddin believes the car rally would provide impetus to implementing the earlier decisions taken on intra-regional growth of tourism, saying that the rally was taking place at an important juncture of progress towards the deeper regional integration. The Bangladesh chief adviser recalled the efforts by the South Asian leaders over the years to promote the people to people contact by facilitating travels between the countries of the region. He also called upon to prioritise the action plan, adopted during the second SAARC tourism ministers' meeting in Cox Bazar last year, and gear up the joint-efforts amassing resources together to make SAARC as a common tourist destination. The rally that began at 12.30 pm local time from Bangladesh's south-eastern tourism city of Cox's Bazar will travel through 8000 kilometres of different terrains in India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives in 30 days. A total of 120 people, representing seven South Asian countries with respective national flags, started the journey from Cox's Bazar stadium, where a colourful inaugural session of the rally took place in the morning. Thirty Tata Safari will carry the participants. Business events have been planned on sector-specific subjects, including trade and economic cooperation, information technology, energy, small and medium enterprise cooperation, executive roundtable, tourism and fish processing, in each of the member states through which the rally will travel. The initiative for arranging the car rally was first floated in the 13th SAARC summit in November 2006. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, proposed the rally in line with his proposal for better connectivity among the South Asian nations. (ANI)
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