Junior home minister Nityanand Rai has informed the Lok Sabha that the government will complete fencing the India-Bangladesh border by December 2020, highlighting through facts and figures the steps taken by the Centre to curb infiltration that is a major irritant for the BJP dispensation.

In response to questions from the Congress’s Vincent H. Pala and Abdul Khaleque and the YSR Congress’s Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, Rai told the House 2,803km of the sanctioned 3,326km had already been fenced. The minister added that work was in progress to fence another 169.64km, and 353.48km remained to be fenced.

“The plan is to complete the fencing of 3,326km by 2020,” Rai said.

The minister informed Parliament that the government had spent Rs 1,138.48 crore in the past five years to fence the border.

The India-Bangladesh border and its fencing are important issues for the BJP, which has accused successive governments in Bengal, both of the Left and the Trinamul Congress, of encouraging infiltration from the neighbouring country for the sake of “vote-bank politics”.

“Infiltration is a relevant issue in the border areas. This was evident in the BJP’s victory in the Ranaghat and Bongaon Lok Sabha seats. Top leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah, swivelled the spotlight on infiltration during the campaign,” said a government official in North 24-Parganas, where a large part of the Bangladesh border is yet to be fenced.

Rai mentioned in his reply that infiltration was continuing unabated because of the “difficult riverine terrain in parts of the international border with Bangladesh which are not amenable to physical fencing”.

According to Rai, 3,296 infiltrators had been apprehended along the India-Bangladesh border in 2015, which came down to 992 in 2017 and 900 in 2018.

Economist Prasenjit Bose questioned why the Centre was spending crores to prevent the entry of a few hundred infiltrators. “It is a huge expenditure compared to the number of infiltrators, and even the numbers given by the government prove that,” he said.