Nepal: Will take up BRI projects with China soon

Nepal and China will sign the implementation plan of the Belt and Road Initiative “very soon”, Deputy Prime Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha has said, nearly seven years after the two neighbours inked an agreement to undertake ambitious Beijing-backed infrastructure projects in the Himalayan nation.

“Once we sign the implementation plan, we will move into the implementation phase,” Shrestha said. Nepal and China signed an MoU on the BRI in 2017. However, not a single project has either been executed or negotiated.

He said the two countries will sign the implementation plan of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) “very soon” without specifying any date.

His statement came as Sun Haiyan, a senior leader of China’s ruling Communist Party, was visiting Nepal and meeting the country’s top leaders.

Meanwhile, speaking during an interaction programme with various political leaders of Nepal that was organised, Sun Haiyan, the Vice Minister of the International Liaison Department of the Communist Party of China, urged the stakeholders of both nations to not get affected by the attempts by other countries to spoil ties between China and Nepal.

Without naming any nation, Ms. Sun said that countries come and go but it was the people of Nepal and China who were affected.