Jan. 1: Bhutan may have shut the door on militants from the Northeast but it hasn’t shut out Indian villagers looking for work opportunities.

Residents of scores of villages in this Bodo-dominated district straddle the Indo-Bhutan border everyday, living here but working there. Gobda Narzary, a resident of Kumguri village near Datgiri, heads for Gelephu at the crack of dawn to work as a daily-wage labourer and earns Rs 100 for a day’s work. “If I stay back in my village, I would get only Rs 40 for my labour,” Gobda explains.

Basanti Narzary, who works as a cleaner in one of the hotels in the same town, echoes him. “Life in our village is difficult with no drinking water, leave alone water for irrigation. My husband and I work in Bhutan and earn Rs 200 daily to support our family of five, including three children who go to school.”

Gobda and Basanti are not alone. Over 800 villagers from 19 frontier hamlets near Hatisar-Datgiri and the neighbouring areas — inhabited by Bodo, Nepali Rajbongshis and Santhalis — cross over to the south Bhutan town everyday to work as labourers. They work in houses, farms, factories and stone quarries.

Gelephu offers employment to around 24,000 Indian labourers of both sexes. According to a conservative estimate, the town pays Rs 24 lakh per month to these migrant workers. The figure will be much higher if Phuntsholling town in the west and the Samdrukdzngkhar in the east are taken into account.

“There is a heavy rush at the gate in the morning hours as over 800 labourers cross the border daily. There is a rush again in the evening when the workers return to their villagers,” a Bhutanese immigration official said. The labourers arrive before 7 am and spread out to various locations . They get Rs 100 per head after a hard day’s work. Most of them are also given food.

In recent times, the border gate remained closed for more than a month only twice. There was a brief closure in the aftermath of the Royal Bhutan Army’s Operation All Clear in December 2003 to root out Indian insurgent camps. The border was closed for a second time after a grenade blast at Gelephu on September 5, 2004. On both occasions, Gelephu hired workers from West Bengal and Bihar via Phuntsholling, much to the frustration of workers from villagers along the Assam-Bhutan border.

The villagers held a demonstration on the border in desperation, asking Bhutan not to take away their livelihood. Moved by their appeal, the Bhutanese government reopened the gates after a meeting between its home affairs minister J.S. Tsering Wangda and the Chirang deputy commissioner in early 2005.