A jawan guards the Indian side of the Bangladesh border

New Delhi, April 25: Indians will have to learn to live with illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

The government is coming round to the view that there is no way India can deport the immigrants to Bangladesh when Dhaka refuses to acknowledge them as its citizens.

Officials say every time an illegal immigrant is refused Bangladeshi citizenship, international law and convention require that India let them stay on. They are not eligible for all the rights that an Indian citizen can claim but can continue to stay in India.

Under the multipurpose national identity card scheme ? the pilot project has been delayed and is expected to be completed this year-end ? the government has decided to give them a resident card instead of a citizenship card.

Technically, the officials say, once Dhaka disowns its nationals living in India, they become ?stateless?. International conventions require that they be allowed to live in the country where they are found till a decision is reached on their citizenship status.

An official said the only other way to send them back to Bangladesh is to push them illegally through the border. Government officials have long conceded this is what the border forces do but the numbers have never been significant to make a difference.

?But it is rather uncivilised and not something that anyone ? on this side or that ? should be doing to deal with a problem involving human beings,? an official said, pointing out the best way to deal with the problem was to speed up erecting the border fence and strengthen policing.

?Everything else that the government says or does is to cater to its political constituency,? an official said, hinting at the Delhi police plan, once submitted to the high court, that promises to deport 100 Bangladeshi nationals every day. From 2001 to June last year, Delhi police claimed to have deported 12,200 people.

The officials, however, concede that most of them would have come back through the porous border. ?Many of them, specially in a place like Delhi, treat it as a forced-but-paid holiday?. They only need to spend money on their return journey,? one of them said.

The Border Security Force is fed up of managing hundreds of people whenever any state goes into overdrive to round up immigrants and sends them to the border for deportation proceedings.

According to a group of ministers on national security, there were 1.2 crore Bangladeshi immigrants in the country in 2001 with 50 lakh in Assam alone.

The UPA government has, however, rubbished this estimate, arguing that there is no basis for this figure. But it has acknowledged that the number is significant.

It was this view in the government that prompted home minister Shivraj Patil to declare after the chief ministers? conference in Delhi last week that the problem of Bangladeshi immigrants had to be handled in a humane manner.

Patil also pointed out that though the problem cannot be overlooked it is important not to blow it out of proportion.

?It should be looked at in the right perspective,? he declared after listening to seven chief ministers, including those of Bengal and Maharashtra, who had sought action from the Centre.