For 68 years, the border between India and Bangladesh around Cooch Behar wasn’t a single line. It was made of loops: pockets of each country stranded inside the other, and one patch of farmland that was India, inside Bangladesh, inside India, inside Bangladesh.
162
enclaves (111 Indian, 51 Bangladeshi) changed country at midnight on 31 July 2015, ending a border tangle that had lasted since Partition.
MEA India, Land Boundary Agreement (2015)
Indian territory (enclave) inside BangladeshBangladeshi territory (enclave) inside Indiainternational border
The Cooch Behar–Rangpur border before 1 August 2015. Each red shape is a piece of India surrounded by Bangladesh, and each green shape is a piece of Bangladesh surrounded by India. Small dots inside dots are counter-enclaves. The shape counts are real (111 and 51), but their positions are schematic.
01 · The nest
One field, three borders deep
Dahala Khagrabari was the only third-order enclave on Earth: a 0.69-hectare field of India, inside a scrap of Bangladesh, inside a village of India, inside Bangladesh.
To walk from it to the rest of India, a farmer would have had to cross four international borders, and none of them had a checkpoint. Records show the plot was farmed but nobody lived on it.
It sat at the bottom of a nested system. Whyte’s 2002 survey counted every level separately: 173 first-order enclaves, 24 counter-enclaves (enclaves inside enclaves), and this single third-order one.
02 · Two sides, unequal
India held more than twice as much on the wrong side
On every measure, India’s pieces inside Bangladesh outweighed Bangladesh’s pieces inside India by about 2.2 to 2.6 times.
The swap meant India gave up about 10,000 acres more than it received, close to 40 km². That made the deal politically hard: it took a constitutional amendment, India’s 100th, passed in 2015.
The swap also settled the last 6.1 km of the 4,096.7 km land border that had never been demarcated. The land itself had never really been governed from the capitals. Enclave residents couldn’t reach police, courts, schools or clinics without crossing a border, and for decades they had no papers to cross it legally.
03 · From a country to a football pitch
Four orders of magnitude
The enclaves ranged from Dahagram–Angarpota, a 26 km² Bangladeshi territory home to a large town, down to plots smaller than a football pitch.
Dahagram–Angarpota is about 3,800 times the size of Dahala Khagrabari. It was the one enclave not exchanged in 2015. Bangladesh kept it, and since 1992 it has reached the mainland through the Tin Bigha corridor, a 178 × 85 m strip of Indian land leased to Bangladesh in perpetuity.
The smallest of all, Upan Chowki Bhajni 24, covered about 2,870 m², roughly 40% of a standard pitch.
04 · The people in the loops
51,549 people and one choice
A joint headcount in July 2011 found 51,549 people living in the enclaves. In 2015 each of them could choose a citizenship, and almost all of them stayed where they were.
51,549
enclave residents in the 2011 joint India–Bangladesh headcount (MEA)
987
people left Indian enclaves in Bangladesh for India, November 2015 (ORF)
15,208
people became Indian citizens in total (ORF 2017)
~36,000
former Indian-enclave residents became Bangladeshi where they lived (approx.)
05 · 302 years to untangle
From a 1713 treaty to a 2015 midnight
The patchwork dates from a 1713 treaty between the Koch Bihar kingdom and the Mughal Empire. Partition turned it into international borders, and it took three agreements to undo.
What to notice on the map
Why it matters
The red is on the green side, and the green is on the red side. Each country’s land lay inside the other, mostly within a few kilometres of the border.
Look for the dots inside dots. Those 24 counter-enclaves are what made the border impossible to police or administer, and also impossible to walk around.
Find Tin Bigha. The one enclave that survived the swap still depends on a 178-metre lane of leased Indian land.
Borders on maps are claims. For 68 years, tens of thousands of people lived inside lines that both governments drew and neither government could reach.
Sources & notes
Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India — Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh (booklet, 2015). 111 Indian enclaves (17,160.63 acres) and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves (7,110.02 acres); joint headcount 14–17 July 2011 of 51,549 people (37,334 / 14,215); Tin Bigha lease of 178 × 85 m (1974 LBA, implemented 1982/1992); 4,096.7 km land border; 1958 Nehru–Noon agreement; 2011 Protocol.
Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, 2015, India; exchange of ratification instruments, Dhaka, 6 June 2015. Legal basis for the swap, which took effect at midnight on 31 July 2015.
Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, “From stateless to new citizens”, Observer Research Foundation (2017). 987 people from Indian enclaves chose Indian citizenship and moved; 14,221 residents of Bangladeshi enclaves opted for Indian citizenship (15,208 new Indian citizens in total); moves in mid-to-late November 2015 to camps at Mekhliganj, Haldibari and Dinhata.
Brendan R. Whyte, Waiting for the Esquimo: An Historical and Documentary Study of the Cooch Behar Enclaves of India and Bangladesh, University of Melbourne (2002); figures as summarised in Wikipedia, “India–Bangladesh enclaves” and “Dahala Khagrabari” (accessed Oct 2026). Nesting counts: 102 + 71 first-order enclaves, 21 + 3 counter-enclaves, 1 counter-counter-enclave; areas of Dahala Khagrabari (0.00688 km²), Upan Chowki Bhajni 24 (0.00287 km²) and Dahagram–Angarpota (25.95 km²); 1713 Koch Bihar–Mughal treaty origin.
Smithsonian Magazine, “This Was the Turducken of Border Disputes” (2015). Dahala Khagrabari as a farmed, uninhabited plot and the world’s only third-order enclave.
IFAB / FIFA, Laws of the Game. Recommended international pitch of 105 × 68 m (7,140 m²), used only as a size comparison.
Notes: the map is a schematic drawing. The numbers of red and green shapes match the 2015 exchange lists (111 and 51), but where each shape sits is illustrative. Counter-enclaves are drawn using Whyte’s count, and because his system counts composite enclaves differently, his totals don’t match the treaty lists exactly. The rest of Bangladesh in the first citizenship bar (≈36,300) is the 2011 headcount minus 987, so it’s approximate. Acres are converted at 1 acre = 4,046.86 m². The story that the enclaves were won and lost in chess or card games between the Raja of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur is folklore. Historians trace the patchwork to the 1713 treaty.