India boosts cooperate with Myanmar

March 10, 2006 - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

India and Myanmar (Burma) have agreed to enhance bilateral cooperation in the fields of remote sensing, petroleum and Buddhism during an official visit by Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam to the country, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

Kalam, who arrived on Wednesday, on Friday gave a lecture to students at Yangon University and was scheduled to visit Mandalay city, in central Myanmar, in the afternoon. He departs on Saturday. The Indian president, whose trip to military-run Myanmar sparked criticism at home, has impressed many of his hosts.

"In Burma we say a leader must be father to the military, father to Buddhism and father to the students. The Indian president has covered all three while here," said one Yangon observer, who asked to remain anonymous.

The two neighbouring countries on Thursday signed three agreements, including one that committed the Indian government to providing Myanmar with access to its remote sensing data from Indian satellites IRS-PS and IRS-P6 at subsidized rates.

"The service, which will be extended by Antrix Corporation Limited to the Myanmar Economic Corporation at a cost of 1.6 million dollars per annum, will be subsidized by the government of India to the tune of 600,000 dollar per annum for a period of three years," said the agreement, which was signed by Indian Foreign Secretary Shri Shyam Saran and Myanmar Deputy Foreign Minister Kyaw Thu.

In the petroleum sector the two countries agreed to enhance cooperation in the exploration of Myanmar's offshore reserves and confirmed that Myanmar would threat India as a "preferential buyer" of its natural gas exports.

Currently Myanmar only exports natural gas to its neighbour to the east, Thailand.

India and Myanmar also signed a pact to cooperate in Buddhist studies in the exchange of students, teachers and monks, and compiling and publishing glossaries on Buddhist terms, conserving old manuscripts and holding seminars and exhibitions on Buddhism that originated in India and spread to Myanmar where it is now the national religion.

During Karam's talks with Myanmar leader Senior General Than Shwe, the sensitive topic of the ongoing detention of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been studiously avoided but India, as the world's largest democracy has offered to contribute to "capacity building" in Myanmar's "democractic transition process," diplomatic sources said.

Myanmar is deemed a pariah state among most Western democracies for its ongoing imprisonment of Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize laureate who has been under house arrest for the past two and a half years, and its failure to introduce political reforms to edge out the military junta that has ruled the country since 1988.