By Syed Zarir Hussain, IANS,
Abhayapuri (Assam) : For just Rs.400, organised criminal networks smuggle Bangladeshi citizens to India despite the barbed wire fence that separates the two countries along much of their border, officials said Saturday.
This was revealed by six illegal Bangladeshi migrants arrested Thursday by police in Abhayapuri in Bongaigaon district, about 240 km west of Assam’s main city Guwahati.
Locals in the area suspected foul play when they found six hawkers trading in steel and aluminium utensils and began questioning their antecedents.
“Police were informed and when we interrogated them, they confessed to entering India about six months ago with the help of an organised network by paying money,” A. Basumatary, a police official investigating the case, told IANS.
Stung by poverty, 40-year-old Abdul Haq, his nephew Al Amin, and four others from Dinajpur district in Bangladesh were searching for a better life in India when they came across a network involved in human trafficking.
“We paid Rs.200 to agents on the Bangladesh side who then helped us cross the border along West Bengal at night. Indian agents were waiting on the other side of the border and we paid them Rs.200 and they guided us to India,” Haq told IANS from the police lockup.
The six of them then entered Assam and since then were engaged in hawking utensils in villages dominated by Bengali speaking residents.
“Life was very hard in Bangladesh and we thought entering Assam would be a good idea to make a living,” Amin said.
The arrested Bangladeshis said the route the network agents took to smuggle them to India was free of any danger, with no frontier guards present.
“It was easy and we did not have any problems entering India. It took us just a few hours to reach the Indian side,” Haq said.
“Criminal networks which smuggle human beings for financial gain increasingly control the flow of migrants across borders. We shall have to investigate and see how best we can bust this cross border racket of smuggling humans,” another senior police official said.
India and Bangladesh share a 4,095 kilometre border with over half along the northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram.
A vast stretch of the border is still unfenced. Plus, there are many stretches where rivers form the border. This makes it easy for traffickers to infiltrate into India.
India has often charged that Bangladeshi citizens enter Indian territory illegally across the porous border. Bangladesh denies its nationals cross illegally into India.