BSF personnel patrol the border at Sidhai Mohanpur, 30 km north of Agartala. Picture by Eastern Projections

Agartala/Guwahati, June 24: Rubber just might achieve what barbed wire and checkpoints have failed to do — insulate Tripura against cross-border smuggling.

The Union commerce ministry has proposed a plan to stem, if not uproot, illegal rubber trade and bolster Tripura’s reputation as the second rubber capital of the country.

Mooting the concept of “social fencing”, the ministry has proposed that existing plantations along 42 km of the border, covering 1,500 hectares, should be extended to 200 km.

“Why not let legal exchange replace the illegal trade that goes on at the border?” asked Union minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh during his trip to Agartala on Friday.

Tripura shares an 830-km border with Bangladesh on three sides. While smuggling of cattle and goods is rampant, Ramesh reasoned that if smugglers turned cultivators, illegal trade could be stemmed.

After apprising Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the plan, the ministry wrote to home minister Shivraj Patil on June 4, seeking the clearance of security agencies.

“Rubber plantations along the border could be some sort of a ‘social fencing’,” the letter said.

The home ministry was critical of Assam’s refusal to allot land along the Bangla border in Harinagar last year. The argument had been that allotment of land would discourage encroachment by Bangladeshi farmers.

Whether security agencies apply the same yardstick to the commerce minister’s proposal will be known in a few weeks, sources said.

James Jacob, director of research at the Rubber Research Institute of India, and officers of the Tripura Forest Development and Plantation Corporation Ltd, Rubber Board and the BSF inspected sections of the Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura in April.

The team visited the Anandapur and Matinagar plantation centres, where rubber is cultivated on 400 hectares of land, running 6 km along the BSF security fence, this side of the border. The plantations line the Indo-Bangla Border Road that runs adjacent to the security fence 150 yards inside the Zero Line, or the international boundary with Bangladesh.

“The team is of the opinion that growing rubber on the home side of the fence on the Indo-Bangla international border over an area of 7,500 hectares (including an area limited to 6,000 hectares of denuded/degraded forest land) is worth considering,” the report said.

There is, however, a hurdle. A mature rubber tree has thick foliage and grows to about 15 to 30 feet. The plantations could obstruct visibility of security personnel perched on 15-feet high observation posts. The rubber board team said this could be countered by controlling plantation parameters.