SAARC participants to meet in Nepal

The current chair of the SAARC, Nepal, had decided to postpone the SAARC Summit until further notice after four nations Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan and India requested to postpone the summit in Islamabad

Senior officials of SAARC are scheduled to meet in Kathmandu this week for the first time since the summit was postponed last year to discuss various issues.

The meet on February 1-2 to attend the Programming Committee will be the first meeting of the SAARC member states since the postponement of the 19th SAARC that was supposed to take place in Islamabad November last year, a Foreign Ministry official said.

The SAARC member states will discuss a number of issues in the meeting and it includes the budget of the SAARC Secretariat and five regional centers of SAAR.

The difficulty relating to rescheduling the next SAARC summit will also come up during the meeting, to be attended by joint secretaries of the SAARC countries.

India along with three other countries had accused Pakistan for not creating a conducive environment and not cooperating on combating cross-border terrorism in South Asia for holding the SAARC Summit.