Click to play videoHilli (West Bengal): The Indo-Bangladesh border is non-existent at many places with just a wall separating the two countries which young men scale and jump through to move from one country to another, carrying with them everything from sacks of rice to bottles of drugs.
At other places the border comes between two houses, one wall in Bangladesh and the other in India.
The smuggling run takes place on the walls on the Indo-Bangladesh border everyday.
Nobody knows who built the wall in West Bengal's border town of Hilli. But far from dividing two countries it's a wall that unites smugglers, illegal infiltrators and in recent times terrorists.
On the Indian side of the wall the houses are just an arm's length away. On the Bangladeshi side is a railway station.
Partition divided the area into two towns with the same name. What remains is a railway track on the border which runs through Bangladesh and is the lifeline of smuggling and illegal activities and is used by the terrorist for their movement.
Whenever there is a flurry of activity, it surely means that a train is pulling into the Hilli Station on the Bangladeshi side of the wall.
Every train that stops at the Hilli Station carries away smuggled Indian goods and also bring in potential infiltrators and illegal migrants.
The presence of CNN-IBN reporters initially inhibits the smugglers on the wall. But they continue to stand fearlessly on the wall waiting to receive packages and sacks from their Indian agents.
"This is a daily occurrence. It only goes down at night," says an Indian smuggler.
Almost everyone is Hilli is involved in smuggling. Women couriers wrap small packages around their sarees and take the contraband to small houses, crammed around narrow lanes and close to the border wall.
For Bangladeshi boys on a wall, the last point between India and Bangladesh, it's simply a hop, skip and jump into the other country.
They carry sacks of phensydyl, drugs, rice and almost everything that has a demand in Bangladesh.
The smuggling takes place in broad daylight, in clear knowledge of everyone in the town.
"I am going to take rice from here (India). I carry around 200 kg in instalments but here I have only 50 kg in each sack. Today I will carry four sacks. If they manage to catch us they just verbally abuse and let us go and the process goes on," says a Bangladeshi smuggler.
A video shot by an intelligence agency show groups of smugglers on one side of the railway track waiting to step across to the Bangladeshi side of Hilli and Bangladeshi infiltrators waiting to cross over towards India.
The visuals show Bangladesh Rifles soldiers not making any attempt to stop smuggling or infiltration.
CNN-IBN reporters also crossed over to the Bangladeshi side and re-entered India effortlessly
On the Zero Line, right on the International Border, Bangladeshis and Indians live in close proximity, a situation that virtually makes the border and all security arrangements to make it inviolate absolutely meaningless.
And this could be and is easily exploited by terror infiltrators and anti-national operatives.
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