Identifying and deporting illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from Gujarat is increasingly proving to be a fruitless - and an expensive - exercise for the authorities.
Identifying and deporting illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from Gujarat is increasingly proving to be a fruitless - and an expensive - exercise for the authorities.
It takes 10 different agencies over one year's of hard work and an expenditure of Rs1 lakh to take the immigrant to the Indo-Bangla border for deportation. But thanks to the porous border between the two countries, it takes the deportee just five days and Rs 1,000 days to again return to Gujarat.
The city police estimate that there are around 40,000 illegal Bangladeshi migrants in the city. Sources said the police frequently detain many of them after identification.
However, their detention is rarely recorded on paper as the legal procedure for identifying, arresting and then deporting illegal migrants is long and tedious.
Moreover, the entire exercise is reduced to a farce when a deported immigrant resurfaces in the state, sometimes even before the police party that had escorted him to the border has returned home.
"It takes more than a year to get detailed information about an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. Till then, we have to keep the detainee in lock-up at the state's expense," said BL Solanki, deputy commissioner of police, Special Operation Group (SOG).
Another source in SOG, DCB Ahmedabad, told DNA that as many as ten police teams from different central and state police agencies interrogate a suspected illegal immigrant after his arrest in the city.
CID (crime), state railway police, special branch of the city commissionerate, Gujarat ATS, state DRI, state intelligence bureau, central Intelligence Bureau, coast guard, officials from the army and navy intelligence - all have to be involved in the interrogation of an illegal immigrant, the source said.
Once an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant is actually arrested, he is kept in police lock-up in Ahmedabad where he is interrogated by all the 10 security agencies. This alone takes around four months.
When it is clear that the detainee is actually an illegal immigrant, he is sent to the Joint Interrogation Centre in Bhuj where all foreign nationals detained for various offences are kept till they can be deported to their home country.
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