More migrants returned to Bangladesh in last 1 month
BSF has also noticed a substantial decrease in cattle smuggling while smuggling of drugs, especially Yaba tablets, shot up in 2019
The number of illegal migrants trying to leave India and entering Bangladesh has increased in the last one month, a top official of the Border Security Force in West Bengal said on Friday.
The force's inspector general (South Bengal frontier) YB Khurania said at least 268 Bangladeshi nationals have been intercepted in January.
"Even though we are not seeing an exodus but there has been a substantial increase in incidents in which people are illegally trying to cross the international border and enter Bangladesh," Khurania said in Kolkata.
"Ninety percent of them were trying to leave India and enter Bangladesh," Khurania added.
BSF has also noticed a substantial decrease in cattle smuggling while smuggling of drugs, especially Yaba tablets, shot up in 2019, he said. In January, 10,000 such tablets have been seized.
The number of people caught while trying to cross over to Bangladesh from India increased by more than 50% with 2971 arrested by BSF in 2018 as compared to 1800 in 2017, according to latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
A large number of those who were caught trying to illegally emigrate were women and children, HT reported on January 20.
NCRB's "Crime in India 2018" report says that out of the 2971 people arrested in 2018 while making an "outward movement" to Bangladesh, 1532 were men, 749 women and 690 children.
The corresponding numbers were 1477, 268 and 55 respectively in 2017.
