QUOTING a top official of Indian Border Security Force, a local daily reported that drug smuggling has increased along the India-Bangladesh border. The BSF boss, however, assured that this time they are really serious in beefing up anti-drug measures along the border. Mentionable, India is the prime supply source of Phensidyl – the most common substance used by the Bangladeshi drug addicts. There are several hundreds of industrial units that produce phensidyl along the Indian border.
The report said BSF troopers have seized and destroyed drugs and over 1,017,255 cannabis plants worth Rs 255 crore along the border with Bangladesh in recent months. Plantations of cannabis are done on a large scale in the interior and inaccessible areas of the border region. The news report stated that since most of these plantations are tucked away in hills and forests, Indian government agencies are experiencing a tough time to detect and destroy them. According to reports, India has been erecting barbed wire fence and putting up floodlights on the 4,096-km India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and Mizoram to check trans-border criminal activities of which drug business is top listing one. And around 90 percent of the Tripura borders has been fenced and floodlights put on to check crimes, infiltration and trans-border movement of smugglers, even CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras are being installed in BOPs (border outposts) and biometric devices are being used for better border management, claimed the Indian security expert.
In the home front, the drug-addiction scenario is more than worrying one. The younger generation — male and female — both in rural and urban areas — is so involved in drug usages or abuses that the very vital of the youth force has been eaten off. Drug is now a law and under issue because the addicts are increasingly involving themselves in various criminal activities to manage money for the drugs.
Dealing in contrabands – phensidyl, brown-sugar, Yaba, injections etc is now a major, but open, business in the country. The business is a big joint-venture of the police, people in power and the under-ground godfathers. The nation as a whole is poised for the dooms day.
As to the measures of facing or controlling the drug agenda, there are two sets of opinions. Some emphasise on demand side control. They argue that the users should be demotivated, warned about the fall-outs and mass awareness to be built up to lower the demand the for drug usages. The others put much weight on controlling the supply side — that stop all supply sources of drug from inside or outside of the country.
We strongly support that controlling the supply side could be a more effective measure. But for that the corrupt security elements on both side of the fence need to be controlled first so that the trans-border drug smuggling could be stopped. If it can be done then other remedial actions will succeed naturally.
