Balurghat, June 10: Talks between Indian and Bangladeshi officials to resolve the dispute over the building of an embankment along the Atreyee at Samjia, on the India-Bangladesh border, fell through today.

After a meeting that started at 11 am and lasted seven hours, the officers of both the border forces decided to refer the matter to their superiors in Delhi and Dhaka. Civil officials from both the countries were present at the meeting.

The dispute goes back to the night of July 28 last year when the Border Security Force (BSF) found some Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) personnel surreptitiously building an embankment along the Indian side in the darkness of the night.

Since then, several rounds of talks have failed to produce any solution while tension along the border continued to mount.

The BSF maintained that the BDR conducted the construction without following the protocol. ?No construction can take place within 150 metres of the zero-point,? a BSF officer said. Besides, the BDR objected to the Indian counterpart?s decision to start protection work along the river.

Since the matter concerned erosion and the effect of the embankment on the flow of the river during the rains, the chief engineer of the central water resources ministry, Sadhan Biswas, was present at the meeting today.

South Dinajpur district magistrate Syed Sarfraz Ahmed and BSF?s 200 Battalion commanding officer Jagdish Singh Barnala were also present. Bangladesh was represented by officials of their Water Development Board and the BDR.

The talks fell through when the two sides started disputing over who should start the work first. The Bangladeshis insisted that they should complete the work first as they had begun it earlier. But their Indian counterpart argued that both the sides should work simultaneously or else the bank on the Indian side will collapse.

Sources said at the end of the futile meet the two sides agreed to place the matter before the India-Bangladesh River Commission.

?Waiting for the next meeting of the commission is the only alternative we have,? an official said aftercoming out of the meeting.

The commanding officer of the BSF?s 115 Battalion, Umesh Chandra Hazarika, met his BDR counterpart, Mohammad Mustafa, commanding officer of 29 Battalion, at the Customs guest house at Hili today to discuss various issues about border policing.