Word: bangladesh
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...There is a poetic name for the population in these disputed areas: "nowhere people." As India and Bangladesh fight over the land they live on, their status remains in doubt. Despite sporadic diplomatic efforts - the most recent one last September - the two countries have never been able to agree on exchanging the territory or even just accepting the de facto border as it is. "For Bangladesh, every inch is important," particularly as it loses ground to rising sea levels, says Sreeradha Datta, a political scientist at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Bangladeshis in the area...
...India, cows can't be exported for slaughter because orthodox Hindus revere them, but the animals are in great demand in mainly Muslim, meat-eating Bangladesh. An organized network of herders and trucks carries cows across the northern plains of India to cattle markets near the border, where they are dispatched to smugglers who try to sneak them over in ones and twos. The smugglers quickly learned how to get around the fence: the latest in smuggling technology involves a jury-rigged contraption of bamboo poles, iron hooks and old barbed wire used to haul small cows up and over...
...captured 70,000 cows last year - worth about $62 million in Bangladesh. "I'm sure that as many got across," says Ashish Mitra, a former director general of the BSF. "It's a losing battle. Cattle-smuggling is the biggest problem that we have." The absurdities of the ban on cattle exports are a constant source of frustration within the BSF. The cows that are seized are auctioned off at customs depots, and usually bought by the same smugglers, sometimes three or four times. Moving a cow from one end of India to the other is perfectly legal...
...Cows account for about half the illegal trade; Indian government rations of wheat, rice and sugar sold on the black market in Bangladesh, as well as cough syrup (used as an intoxicant across the border), account for the rest. Altogether, this informal trade is nearly as large as the formal trade, according to a 2006 study by the World Bank. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, a researcher with the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, describes typical smugglers: "They are landless, most of them are female, sometimes divorced. They have no other choice." Criminalizing...
...staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits - pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost - back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur to Bangladesh - including the people who lived on the two kings' 162 "chit mahals," or paper palaces. Their villages, caught on the wrong side of the border, are now small islands of India surrounded by Bangladesh or vice versa. Elsewhere in this same stretch of border are villages that simply refuse...