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| Habiba Bibi with the fake notes after her arrest. Picture by Surajit Roy |
Malda, Aug. 31: The BSF will for the first time deploy female constables on the Bangladesh border to counter the trend of fake currency rackets using women to smuggle counterfeit notes into the country.
The commandant of the 108 Battalion of the BSF, J.S.N. Prasad, said a lot of fake currency was coming in through the porous border.
“The carriers, in most cases, are Indian women,” the commandant said. “We have issued identity cards to those who work on fields in no man’s land between the border fences of the two countries. The gangs hand over the fake currency notes to them in the no man’s land. Then the women come back with the notes.”
The BSF has no women in its ranks and finds it difficult to search the carriers.
“We have already sent a report to the home ministry, urging it to deploy women constables to thwart this new strategy. It becomes difficult for a male BSF jawan to search a woman.”
Prasad said last night, the border guards had arrested a 40-year-old woman, Habiba Bibi, and seized Rs 2 lakh in counterfeit notes of Rs 500 that were tied to her knee.
Habiba was handed over to Kaliachak police this morning. She is a resident of Charia-Anantapur in Kaliachak, close to the India-Bangladesh border, said the police.
On August 5, the BSF had chased a woman and recovered fake currency with a face value of Rs 3 lakh.
The woman had managed to flee, but had left the bundle containing the counterfeit notes on the road.
“We have information that women carriers have smuggled in more than Rs 10 crore from Bangladesh. The Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, plans to cripple the Indian economy by flooding the country with fake currency before Haj,” the BSF commandant said.
The fake currency notes are printed in Bangladesh.
According to the commandant, the jawans of his battalion alone had seized fake currency with face value of Rs 7.16 lakh this year.
In 2006, Rs 13.70 lakh in fake notes had been seized from Charia-Anantapur, Prasad claimed.
