Swarupnagar, Dec. 1 -- On December 24, 2022, the Border Security Force's (BSF) 115 Battalion detained a seven-year-old girl near Indo-Bangladesh border in West Bengal with around 107 grams of heroin. On October 22 this year, the force's 143 Battalion apprehended a 12-year-old boy in possession of gold worth around Rs.1.64 crore while heading towards the Bangladesh border. In both the occasions, the apprehended children were acting at the behest of their mothers, officials said. BSF officials maintain that over the last few years, several such incidents have come to fore where children were being used as couriers to smuggle gold and contraband across the largely unfenced border. Data from BSF's South Bengal Frontier, which guards India's eastern borders with Bangladesh, reveal that around 80 children have been detained for smuggling activities in border villages across south Bengal between 2021 and November 2025. The border here spans roughly 920 km. This year alone, 11 such cases have been reported, including the gold smuggling attempt on October 22 at Daharkanda village in Hakimpur of North 24 Parganas district. "Around 10.30 am, we saw the boy suspiciously moving towards the border. He was wearing black shorts and a dark pink T-shirt. Our men immediately chased the boy and caught him. At least 11 gold biscuits, kept in a black polythene packet, were seized from him," a BSF official posted in Hakimpur said. The boy, 12, was subsequently handed to the customs department along with the seized gold and produced before the Juvenile Justice Board, which sent him to a juvenile home, officials said. During his questioning, the boy revealed that his mother had sent him to deliver the packet at a designated spot, officials said. The boy's mother is currently lodged in a Dum Dum jail. Increasing number of children and young adults being caught smuggling drugs and other contraband to Bangladesh for quick money has been reported in the last three years. On 17 May 2022, a 17-year-old boy from Raninagar, Murshidabad, was held with 55 bottles of Phensedyl. "During questioning, it surfaced that the boy had done it for Rs.1,000. He had taken the consignment from a resident of Raninagar and was going to hand it over to a resident of Dashmari village in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, just across the riverine border," another BSF official said. Of the 11 such cases this year, at least seven were reported from Swarupnagar in North 24 Parganas, officials said. "The border here is unfenced and riverine. Villages lie very close to the border, with easy approach roads on both sides," a third BSF official said. The Indo-Bangladesh border runs 4,096 km, passing through West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. West Bengal alone shares about 2,216 km of the border-the longest international border shared by any Indian state. A senior BSF official noted that around 864 km of the Indo-Bangladesh border remains unfenced across the five states. "It is these unfenced stretches that make the border more vulnerable to smuggling. As contraband volume rises, children are increasingly roped in by smugglers as shields," the official said. Data submitted to the Lok Sabha in March reveals that contraband seizures along the Indo-Bangladesh border reached a record high of Rs.461.7 crore in 2024, up from Rs.137 crore in 2018 and Rs.247 crore in 2020....