Swaraj attends Indo-Lanka Joint Commission meet in Colombo

On her second visit to Sri Lanka within a year, Swaraj and her Lankan counterpart Mangala Samaraweera will co-chair the Joint Commission meet which will be held tomorrow in Colombo.

The agreements were inked on the sideline of the 9 session of the Indo Sri Lanka Joint Commission which was inaugurated this afternoon.

India has invited Sri Lankan fisheries minister to visit the country and Colombo has accepted the invitation, officials said.

Though the fishermen’s associations of the two sides are in regular touch with each other, they have not been able to reach a mutually-acceptable solution to end this problem.

Gurpreet, hailing from Faridabad, said she and her daughter wanted to return to India at the earliest and claimed that she was taken to Germany by her in-laws in a “fraudulent” way. The use of the giant oil tanks in Trincomalee was also raised.

Some of the other areas discussed between the two countries were tourism, development and counter terrorism.

The minister stepped in to help Gurpreet, who wanted to come back to India, after she posted a short video on Twitter, alleging that she and her seven-year daughter had been kept in a refugee camp in Germany by her husband’s family.

At the 50 minute long meeting, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe said that the Joint Commission mechanism is very important for bilateral relations and proposed that the meeting can he held annually.

Another issue that has dominated discussions is the 500 MW Sampur coal-fired power project, a joint venture between Sri Lanka’s main state electricity provider and the National Thermal Power Corporation, which has been unable to get off the ground though it was signed 10 years ago.