Golok Das, a farmer in India’s northeast Assam state, is happy with the harvest produced by his main 6-hectare farm. But he’d love to sell another 4-hectare plot, just half a kilometre away, even though it’s equally fertile.
Why? It sits on the other side of a barbed-wire fence marking the Bangladesh border, and that means he can’t irrigate it.
The fence was built in 1987 to prevent illegal migration from Bangladesh to India. It traces a line about 150 yards inside the actual border, on Indian land, since no treaty agreement allowed a fence to be built on the border itself.
Large tracts of Indian land, including some villages, were left on the far side of the fence. In the Golokganj sector of Dhubri district, more than 8,000 farmers struggle with a fence between their homes and their land. They are allowed to cross though the fence each day to work their holdings, but only at set hours.
Now changing climatic conditions in the region for the first time require farmers to irrigate their land frequently to get a good crop - but legal and bureaucratic obstacles make it hard to invest in irrigation on the far side of the fence, meaning harvests there are two-thirds lower than those on the Indian side.
Less grain across the fence
Farmers say their land on the Indian side of the fence yields nearly 1,500kg of rice a year, while an equivalent area on the Bangladesh side produces no more than 500kg.
By law, construction of any concrete or permanent structure is forbidden near the fence, local people say.
Sarkar said that even taking tractors onto the land requires a lengthy bureaucratic process.
Local people worry they will have to give up farming on the Bangladeshi side of the fence as a result of the weather changes, and complain that neither the district administration nor the Indian government’s Border Security Force (BSF) have been sympathetic to their problems.
8 to 4 farmers
Gates to cross the border are open from 8am to 4pm, a farmer said, and outside these times no Indian citizen is allowed to work land on the Bangladesh side.
In addition, he said, people living on the Bangladeshi side of the border sometimes damage Indian-owned crops or harvest them, leaving Indian growers with no produce to show for their labour.
Farmers and civil society groups have long urged India’s government to purchase their land on the other side of the fence.
Members of Nagarik Unnayan Mancha, a civil society group, say they plan to file a petition on the issue at the Gauhati high court.
The state government, however, says that it cannot act alone on a matter affecting the country’s border.
