Online Desk: Bangladesh and India would further accelerate mutual cooperation in the areas of information, media, film and television and significantly promote the people to people relations between the two neighboring countries.

State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Mohammad Ali Arafat and Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Pranay Verma reached an agreement in this regard at a meeting at the state minister’s office in the Bangladesh Secretariat here this afternoon.

“We discussed different bilateral issues in the meeting. But we specially talked about the BTV’s upcoming two-hour slot of international news analysis on current affairs and news presentation,” Arafat told reporters after the meeting.

The state minister said they discussed on the possibilities of building cooperation between the state-run BTV and Indian news agencies, especially ANI, over the BTV’s upcoming two-hour chunk.

“As BTV is aired in India, we are thinking of increasing the length of the new chunk, which will have the analysis of global news, including reports from different countries of South Asia, up to three or four hours maintaining an international standard. So, we will try to attract the Indian audiences to this programme,” he added.

Arafat said they also talked about building cooperation between Film and Television Institute of India on different exchange and training programmes and added, “We also talked about exploring further scopes to produce more coproduction like our ‘Mujib: The Making of a Nation’ film”.

Noting that they discussed about exchanging experiences of Indian institutions working on tackling disinformation, the state minister said, “We will try to understand the process of combating disinformation and if needs, we will take initiatives to organise trainings on this issue”.

Earlier, emerging from the meeting, Indian High Commissioner Pranay Verma said, “We discussed many areas of bilateral cooperation. We also expressed our views that cooperation in information, media, film and television is a very important part of our relationship and also very significant for our people to people relations.”

He said at the meeting that they reviewed some of the very good successes the two countries achieved through mutual cooperation.

About the biopic of Bangabandhu ‘Mujib: The Making of a Nation’, the Indian envoy said, “It was a joint production between the governments of India and Bangladesh, which came out last year … we did it together and its successes encouraged us to look at more such projects in future”.

He said they talked about how they can build institutional linkages between film and television institutes of India and Bangladesh.

“And of course, we talked about more media exchanges and visits of media delegations … so that they get more familiar with current developments and are able to convey the progresses that we made not just in our country but also in our relationship more accurately to the people of Dhaka,” Verma said.