Meghalaya asks Centre to pay for land left beyond border fence

The Meghalaya government has asked New Delhi to compensate people whose land will sit between the international zero line and the planned India-Bangladesh border fence, Deputy Chief Minister Prestone Tynsong has said.

Tynsong, who holds the home (police) portfolio, told reporters that village authorities and landowners from Garo Hills through to East Jaintia Hills are not opposed to the fencing itself. Their worry, he said, is what happens to private plots that end up on the far side of the fence once it is built.

'No man's land'

"The only issue the landowners have a reservation about is the land. Once the fencing is completed, the land beyond the fencing will become like no-man's land. They cannot even go for cultivation," Tynsong said, according to DY365 and The Meghalayan Express.

He said the people affected want the Government of India to take over those parcels and pay for them, rather than leave the land unused. Tynsong estimated that the problem stretches along at least 45 kilometres of the border.

The state has already raised the matter with the Union Ministry of Home Affairs and is waiting for a reply, he said. His comments came when he was asked about the construction of border pillars after a recent meeting with the Border Security Force.

A long frontier

Meghalaya shares a 443-kilometre international boundary with Bangladesh. Fencing has been delayed in places by questions of land, alignment and local consent. Tynsong's remarks underline that, at least in the stretches he described, the dispute is not about whether a fence should be built but about who pays when a farmer can no longer reach a field that remains inside India on paper.

In many stretches along the India-Bangladesh frontier, the fence is not built exactly on the zero line. A belt of Indian land can lie between the two, and once a fence goes up that belt is hard for civilians to reach even though it remains inside the country. That is the strip Tynsong said farmers fear will be lost to them unless the Centre buys it.

No response from the Ministry of Home Affairs had been reported by Sunday night. NEInsider will update this story when the Centre replies or when the state publishes a detailed map of the 45-kilometre stretch.