Jamshedpur, Feb. 14: State police have decided to turn to the public for information on illegal Bangladeshi migrants after they failed to identify them on their own. At a top-level meeting of police and intelligence officials in the capital today, it was decided that individuals or groups tipping off about illegal Bangladeshi migrants would be given monetary rewards.

The meeting also discussed several other methods to detect infiltrators. However, police officials were tight-lipped on the issue. Inspector-general of police (special branch) Gauri Shanker Rath, who attended the meeting, told The Telegraph that they were seriously taking the issue of the Bangladeshi infiltrators and were determined to flush them out in the state. He said the exercise of detection and flushing out the infiltrators was already on. He said the police would be holding regular meetings on the issue till such time that they started making some headway in the matter.

“The strategies will not be disclosed at the moment. But one can rest assured that we have developed ways to detect Bangladeshis living in the state without proper documents,” said Rath. He said that after detecting the infiltrators and verifying their identity the government would deport them to Bangladesh in accordance with existing Indian laws.

Rath said he had issued necessary instructions to all deputy commissioners to take action in this regard. He claimed that the administration would get the results soon.

However, another senior official said they were depending largely on people’s cooperation to solve the problem by offering them monetary rewards in lieu of information. The official, who did not want to be quoted, said: “The infiltration issue has been affecting erstwhile Bihar since 1995 due to which the Union government had asked Bihar government to issue notifications to all districts to detect Bangladeshi infiltrators. But except Pakur district, no other district had followed the instructions fearing a political backlash.”