The first round of the biannual Director General-level talks between the border guarding forces of India and Bangladesh is likely to be held in Delhi from June 8 to 11, government sources confirmed.

This will be the first such meeting following the formation of a new government under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in the neighbouring country and after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in West Bengal for the first time.

The Directors General of Border Security Force (BSF) and Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) will meet amid the West Bengal government’s ongoing “detect, delete and deport” drive targeting undocumented Bangladeshi migrants.

The meeting, originally scheduled for February, was postponed due to the Assembly elections in West Bengal.

Over the past week, Home Minister Amit Shah visited forward areas along the Rajasthan and Gujarat borders and flagged demographic changes and radicalisation as key security challenges. In his next leg of visit to the border areas of Tripura on June 5 and 6, and West Bengal around June 14 and 15, he is likely to review border security and also discuss infiltration-related issues with officials.

The BSF is likely to raise issues related to trans-border crimes, assaults on BSF personnel and Indian civilians by Bangladesh-based miscreants, construction of single-row fencing and action against Indian Insurgent Groups (IIGs) operating in Bangladesh.

In 2023 and 2024, the number of personnel injured in attacks by miscreants along the Bangladesh border stood at 74 and 72, respectively. The BGB, during the past two Director General-level talks, had raised concerns over “illegal push-ins” of individuals, including Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN), into Bangladesh by the BSF.

In 2024, as many as 1,049 undocumented individuals were apprehended while leaving the country through the Bangladesh border. In 2025, more than 4000 undocumented persons were intercepted by the BSF while attempting to leave the country through the border, a government official said.

Officially recorded as “exfiltration,” the movement of undocumented migrants without passports and visas through the Bangladesh border is not new, the official added.

“We are under instructions not to let any illegal migrant enter the country, but if undocumented people want to leave, we do not stop them. Their biometrics and other details are recorded before they leave. If they have managed to procure identity documents such as Aadhaar or PAN cards, we write to the authorities concerned to cancel those documents and blacklist their biometrics,” said the official.

The talks are held twice every year, alternately in India and Bangladesh, to facilitate both the border guarding forces to establish robust systems through which cooperation in border guarding and border management is ensured. India and Bangladesh share a 4,096-km border.

As reported by The Hindu on April 14, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) formulated a new deportation policy in March, under which all States have been asked to set up a special task force in each district to “detect, identify and deport/send back illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar” and provide monthly status reports on foreigners who are missing or overstaying their visas.

On March 3, 2020, Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai informed Lok Sabha in a written reply that “some infiltrators are able to enter in a clandestine and surreptitious manner, mainly due to difficult riverine terrain in parts of the international border with Bangladesh, which are not amenable to physical fencing.”