Word: river
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will sound familiar to anyone who has traveled through the country's thick rural darkness. Panidhar's 195 residents live on rice and fish from the surrounding paddy fields and ponds; lucky children get vegetables and lentils, too, but few go to school. The brick factory across the Ichamati River sends boats to fetch a few of the young men; the rest have left for cities many miles away...
...Assam - as well as militant groups such as ULFA that operate in the border areas - falls to the 160,000 troops of India's Border Security Force (BSF), half of whom guard the frontier with Bangladesh. At the biggest gateway between Assam and Bangladesh, a junction of the Brahmaputra River near a market town called Dhubri, the BSF's Water Wing patrols 24 hours a day by speedboat. Ferries carry laborers from the remote villages downstream to jobs in Dhubri, Guwahati or Siliguri, and each one is stopped by BSF guards, who check passengers' documents to prevent Bangladeshis from slipping...
...Scattered across the river like pebbles are tiny islands called chars - no more than the tops of sandbars churned up by the fierce currents. There are dozens of them, and with each monsoon season their boundaries change. Some disappear entirely. The people who live on them move from island to island, and the BSF officers make a point of knowing every person who lives in their territory. "We have to monitor the population," Hemram says. "If there are 10 houses on an island, and suddenly an 11th house appears, we have to find out, Whose is that 11th house? From...
...this more apparent than in the enclaves of Cooch Behar. The story, as it was repeatedly told to me by various BSF officials, goes like this. The Raja of Cooch Behar and the Nawab of Rangpur, the rulers of two minor kingdoms that faced each other near the Teesta River, staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits - pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost - back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur to Bangladesh...
...Shifting Border The word I hear most often to describe this boundary is porous. It twists through all kinds of terrain, from the mangroves on the western end through the fierce currents of the Brahmaputra River in the north to the thick jungles of the Chittagong Hill Tracts on the eastern side, all of which serve as natural barriers. At its most developed, the border looks like Petrapole, the channel for the vast majority of legal migration and one of the largest land crossings in Asia. More than 1,000 people pass through every day, most by bus and some...