New Delhi, Aug. 18: Bangladesh wants the Dhaka-Calcutta train service to be extended to other Indian cities, including Delhi and Ajmer, and has stressed that Mamata Banerjee had been keen on the plan as railway minister.

“We want India and Bangladesh to agree to at least two more cities which will be connected by rail. Right now, it’s just a Calcutta-Dhaka service, we want it to be a service which connects Bangladesh with India, not just the two Bengals,” Bangladesh high commissioner Tariq Karim said.

Karim was speaking after Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s advisers Gowher Rizvi and Mashiur Rahman met senior Indian ministers ahead of Manmohan Singh’s visit to Dhaka next month. Pranab Mukerjee and P. Chidambaram were those Rizvi and Rahman met.

With the Dhaka-Calcutta service already in place, India is now working to link Bangladesh with neighbouring Tripura. The long-term plan is to start trains from Bangladesh to various destinations in India, including New Delhi and the Sufi pilgrim town of Ajmer. “Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, had many times spoken of such possibilities when she was railway minister,” Karim said.

The train plan is part of a larger sub-regional pact Dhaka wants to sign for better road and rail connectivity, power grid and water-sharing with India, Nepal and Bhutan. It has been flagged as “the key issue” in Prime Minister Singh’s planned talks with Sheikh Hasina early next month, besides exchange of border enclaves and trade concessions. Mamata is scheduled to accompany Singh on the trip.

“There is rethinking on the whole paradigm of regional co-operation which will encompass India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the eastern parts of south Asia,” said Rahman, tasked by the Hasina government to forge new economic ties with Bangladesh’s neighbours.

India has also drawn up plans to take its railway network to Bhutan and Nepal. This follows China linking Tibet’s Lhasa with Beijing by train. It has also started work on a rail link to Khasa, on the Nepal-Tibet border.

India, too, acknowledges the strategic and trade significance of networking its neighbours with its 64,000km rail network. “Just like Europe, the time has come to integrate South Asia as one railway hub. My leader Mamata Banerjee has already taken steps to link India with Bangladesh. We will try to link other neighbouring nations like Nepal and Bhutan,” current railway minister Dinesh Trivedi had said recently.