Indo-Pak peace talks to resume in Jan

The two-day talks starting from January 17 would be led by Foreign Secretaries Shym Saran of India and Riaz Mohammad Khan of Pakistan and review the progress made so far at lower-level meetings as well as chart a course for further negotiations, External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters here on Monday evening.

"The coming talks will focus on two subjectspeace and security, including confidence-building measures, and on Jammu and Kashmir," he said.

Saran and Khan had last met in Islamabad in September this year when the second round of peace talks held. The second round had concluded on October 4 when India's the then external affairs minister Natwar Singh held talks with his Pakistani counterpart Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri in Islamabad. The two sides had decided to hold the third round of negotiations in New Delhi in January, 2006.

Ahead of the foreign secretary-level talks, railway officials of India and Pakistan will hold three-day talks from January 4 to reopen a second rail link between the two countries. The train service would link Munabao, a sleepy town in the Indian state of Rajasthan, and Khokrapar, a border town in Pakistan's Sindh province, a route that had been snapped during the 1965 war between the two countries.

The first rail link between India and Pakistan had resumed last year connecting Amritsar and Lahore.

Ties between India and Pakistan, for long bedevilled by Kashmir issue, have improved since January 2004.