Belarus has shown tremendous support during the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971 as an independent member of the UN and as a part of the then Soviet Union.
Just after the independence, Belarus came forward to support Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s dream to mechanise agriculture by providing Belarus agricultural equipment. Belarus also supplied Chittagong Transformer manufacturing Project with machineries and Petrobangla with vehicles.
As Bangladesh is celebrating the birth centenary of Bangabandhu and the golden jubilee of independence, Belarus has sent a delegation headed by Deputy Minister for Industries Dmitry Kharitonchik to witness the historic moment of the country.
The delegation met the press on Saturday after their meetings with LGRD Minister Tajul Islam, Dhaka North City Mayor Atiqul Islam and Gazipur City Corporation Mayor Jahanagir Alam.
They proposed some new ideas to improve the air quality of Dhaka and suburbs. Those include environmental friendly construction equipment, agricultural machineries and electric buses for transportation.
“As Bangladesh has already graduated to a developing country, now it is most important to use environmental friendly construction equipment, agricultural machineries & electric buses for transportation,” said Andrei Rzheussky, the non-resident ambassador of Belarus to Bangladesh, at the briefing.
He said both LGRD Minister and the City Mayor stressed the need to introduce an eco-friendly electric bus to reduce carbon emission and improve the air quality of Dhaka.
“We also met the Commerce Minister on 18th March. As we have a Joint Commission for Trade and Commerce between Belarus and Bangladesh, we discussed how Bangladesh can get entry to the Euro Asian Economic Zone for expanding more economic cooperation between the two friendly countries,” he said.
Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi is the chair of the Joint Commission from the Bangladesh side.
He said the delegation was “highly impressed” to see how the Gazipur Mayor was convincing local people to be a part of the infrastructure project especially for building new 700km road.
“We are ready to give him all out support for the upcoming projects by supplying equipment in different dimensions of this vision to expand,” said the ambassador.
“Belarus firmly believes, under the leadership of Bangabandhu’s daughter H.E. Sheikh Hasina as the country has graduated to a developing country, under the same leadership Bangladesh will find a very wide road to attain the status of developed country by the year 2041,” he said in a written statement.
Honorary Consul of Belarus Aniruddho Roy Chowdhury was also present at the press briefing.
