Visitors check out products at the trade fair in Guwahati on Tuesday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Guwahati, March 23: Bhutan has given its nod to a Druk Air flight from Paro to Guwahati and then to Bangkok, to facilitate air connectivity between the two countries.

“The government has okayed it and only the security clearance is awaited,” Chen Chen Dorji, the vice-president of the Bhutan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said on the sidelines of a seminar on Enhancing Trade Relations between Bhutan and Northeast India here today.

The consul-general of Bhutan at the Royal Bhutan Consulate in Calcutta, Dasho Tsering Wangda, who was in Guwahati earlier this month, said he would request his government to consider the Druk Air flights from Paro to Guwahati.

Paro is the only airport in Bhutan.

Tour operators in Assam gave Wangda a positive feedback about the feasibility of flights from Bhutan to Guwahati, as they expected a good number of tourists to use this sector.

The North Eastern Development Finance Corporation Ltd is co-ordinating the visit of the Bhutanese delegation, along with the ministry for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER).

Dorji said education, IT and tourism were the three areas identified for furthering trade relations between the two regions.

“There have been ancestral ties between the two regions and we now want to build on that to become good trading partners,” he said.

A Bhutan-India friendship trade fair was held at the border town of Gelephu from January 8-12.

“The contacts are good at the government level but thrust should now be on having more people-to-people contact,” Dorji said.

He said lots of students from Bhutan are going to places like Pune and Bangalore for higher education and it would be better if they could be sent to schools in the Northeast, which is closer.

A three-day Bhutan trade show started at the NEDFi Haat today.

A number of companies is exhibiting a varied range of products at the fair.

The Bhutan Board Products Ltd displayed its furniture, while Bhutan Bio displayed its organic products.

Presentations were made by the Assam Industrial Development Corporation Limited, Federation of Industries and Commerce of North Eastern Region and North Eastern Development Finance Corporation Limited on the infrastructure development in the state.

The presentation by AIDC was on the different upcoming industrial parks in the state while the one by Finer focused on trade relations between Bhutan and the Northeast.