South Asia meeting aims to be 'landmark summit': India

NEW DELHI, Monday (AFP) Members of the South Asian regional group SAARC want their meeting in November to be a "landmark summit" and will likely discuss asking Afghanistan to become a member, India said Monday.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit is due to be held in Dhaka against a backdrop of sharply improved relations between its biggest members, nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan.

Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said foreign ministers representing the seven SAARC nations met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last week.

"We all agreed the SAARC summit will be an important and landmark summit," he told a news conference.

"We have agreed we should have a substantive agenda ... move SAARC from making declaratory statements to doing some collaborative work," he said.

He added SAARC members had discussed the "possibility of Afghanistan joining as a new member of SAARC and a number of other issues likely to come up."

All SAARC members must agree on Afghanistan's admission.

SAARC, which groups Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, was founded in 1985 with the aim of fostering closer economic and social ties.

The Dhaka meeting has been delayed twice, once following the Indian Ocean tsunami last December and again after Indian Premier Manmohan Singh refused to attend, citing security concerns in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh pledged to step up security for the summit following nationwide bomb blasts in August that authorities blamed on an outlawed Islamic group which wants introduction of strict Islamic rule in the Muslim-majority country.

South Asia's 1.4 billion people make up one-fifth of humanity and nearly half of the world's poor, earning an average 450 dollars annually.

The last SAARC summit was in 2003 where leaders agreed to launch a free-trade area from 2006 and draw up a social charter.