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.

And what item, pray, appears to be the biggest item on the agenda of Indian smugglers. This is a trick question that I often throw at audiences in India and elsewhere. The answers range from tea and petrol to sugar and foodgrains. Only one person in all these years has got it right and that too at a lecture/discussion with the North East Study Circle in Bangalore in August 2000.

The answer is a six letter word: cattle.

Those skinny, tired-looking, bovines that slowly travel on the Guwahati-Shillong road, as they did during the days of my youth, are the providers of protein for Bangladesh’s millions, especially at Ramzan. Our Awami Leaguer in Chilmari had got it right when he spoke of how economic considerations outweighed religious concerns. There are not less than 200 ‘cattle corridors’ on the Indo-Bangladesh border for these animals. ‘A staggering 1.7 million pieces of cattle are estimated to be illegally imported into Bangladesh every year,’ declared Bakht’s study. Of course, he meant head of cattle when he spoke of pieces. But language aside, Bakht clinically analysed the import of the animals into specific benefits for his country.