Indian smugglers and their local contacts on either side of the international border used excavators to carve out a 10-km “jeepable road” in Myanmar for the ‘Dawn’ of a new drug route through Mizoram, officials said.
Dawn is the name of the nearest habitation from Lungkawlh, a village in central Mizoram’s Serchhip district situated near the border with Myanmar.
Sleuths of the State’s Excise and Narcotics Department discovered the track from the Tiau River – it marks Mizoram’s border with Myanmar – to Dawn after smugglers began using the route to avoid the ethnic conflict-scarred Manipur, considered a more strategic and convenient passage.