3. Difficulties of Access: Many are ineligible for health care benefits, are unfamiliar with family planning programmes, and unable to obtain information easily.

Over and above these concerns, migrants and migration, especially international migration, has become a ‘critical issue for countries of South Asia, as it involves more and more themes of nations and nationalism, particularly post-colonial nationhood in a region marked by massive population flows.’10

Note that phrase at the end: massive population flows.

The numbers we have spoken about in this book are huge. They may appear small if you compare them to the size of India’s population or that of China, each over a billion strong. But the size of just the ‘missing’ Bangladeshi population is the equivalent of seven Bhutans, or nearly a quarter of Nepal.

Refugee Watch, a magazine which reports on conditions of refugee groups in different parts of the world with a special focus on South Asia, has commented that a study of South Asia’s immigration problem would show ‘how the flow of unwanted migrants and refugees results in the marginalisation of the nation—the nation they leave, the nation they enter.’11

Some suggestions for tackling these outflows lie in the UNHCR’s document, The State of the World’s Refugees, 1995, which spoke of the need to implement the 20:20 compact wherein donor nations pledged to earmark at least 20 per cent of their aid budgets and recipient states devote at least 20 per cent of their national budgets to human priority concerns, including basic education, primary health care and the provision of safe drinking water.

Other points which it stressed, included creating a UN administered human security fund to combat international problems such as environmental pollution, natural resource depletion and communicable disease, financed by cuts in military spending and other financial allocations. A third point which has special relevance was to broaden the ‘notion’ of development cooperation between the West and low-income countries to include resource transfers such as private investment, trade, labour migration and debt payments as well as ODA (Overseas Development Assistance) allocations.

The Big Picture can be seen here.

But what does it translate into, for the purposes of this book?

In 1990, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies conducted a study of illegal trade between Bangladesh and India and Myanmar. In 1994, that study was updated with material from the same forty-nine research sites which were observed earlier.

On the basis of the data collected, Zaid Bakht, the author of the report,12 pointed out that 83 per cent of all illegal imports were from India and valued at half a billion dollars for 1993-94. This was nearly 125 per cent higher than the legal imports from India of 413 million dollars. Illegal imports from India through official and unofficial channels amounted to 17.47 per cent of Bangladesh’s total legal imports of 3.56 billion dollars.