Basirhat (west Bengal)--Sitting in his office in Hasnabad in West Bengal’s Basirhat district, BSF deputy commandant Sudhir Kumar is thinking of new ways to stop ‘pepsi’ from being illegally transported across the border to Bangladesh. “It’s not the cola drink, as you might have assumed. A calf is known as ‘pepsi’ in local parlance. It’s a very difficult job to stop a herd of cows, buffaloes and calves from being smuggled to the other side, when all we have are rickety fences and large swathes of unfenced riverine patches,” he says.
His concerns are legitimate. Six districts — Nadia, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Habra, Malda and Krishnanagar — account for 90 per cent of cattle smuggling cases from the south Bengal frontier, where 366 km of the 915 km boundary with Bangladesh is fenced. With fences not enough, the Border Security Force (BSF) has now started devising new ways to curb the problem.
As part of the crackdown on cattle smugglers, the BSF wants 54 villages located at the ‘zero-point’ to be shifted away from the International Border (IB). These villages have 4,749 houses and a population of 30,074. All BSF posts at forward locations maintain a register with photographs and details of all individuals. The registers also have pictures of cattle, photographed with their owners.
The BSF has put up iron pipes and dug up trenches along the barbed wires on the border with Bangladesh to stop ‘pepsis’ from being smuggled. And the results are evident. Since the NDA government came to power, cases of smuggling along the Bangladesh border in the southern part of Bengal have dropped by 75 per cent, data shows. It is in the BSF’s charter of duties to stop cattle smuggling to Bangladesh.
INDIAN EXPRESS
