Currency check

Guwahati, Aug. 7: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will impart training to BSF personnel to detect high-quality fake Indian currency notes in a bid to stop smuggling through the porous India-Bangladesh border.

S.K. Srivastava, inspector-general of the BSF’s Guwahati frontier, said here today that personnel deployed in border areas in the three sectors — Dhubri, Falakata and Cooch Behar — will be trained by RBI officials on how to detect fake currency notes.

He said the fake notes nowadays are of very high quality, which makes it difficult for the security personnel to differentiate them from the originals.

“We are also going to procure fake currency note-detection machines from the RBI. We have plans to give one machine to each company deployed on the border,” Srivastava said on the sidelines of a blood donation camp-cum-organ donation awareness programme organised at the Guwahati frontier headquarters here today.

According to him, the RBI will also create awareness among the people living in the border areas on how to detect the fake currency notes so that it can assist the BSF in busting rackets involved in smuggling of fake notes from Bangladesh.

“We have been also raising the issue (of smuggling of fake notes) with the Bangladeshi authorities in every border meeting,” the IG said.

The BSF guarding the India-Bangladesh border has detected fake Indian currency notes being smuggled from the neighbouring country several times.

Srivastava said last Monday, a BSF team apprehended a fake note racketeer, identified as Bodiot Zamal, 37, from Dhubri town, and recovered fake notes totalling Rs 52,500.

In the past three years, the BSF troops under the Guwahati frontier had seized fakes currency notes totalling Rs 13,94,800.

The BSF’s intensified vigil has resulted in a gradual increase in seizure of fake currencies. The value of fake currencies seized by the BSF has gone up from Rs 3,68,000 in 2011 to Rs 4,31,300 in 2012, and has further gone up to Rs 5,95,500 this year.

At the blood donation camp, which was conducted with the help of doctors and staff of Model Blood Bank of Gauhati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH), altogether 60 BSF and National Disaster Response Force personnel donated blood.