Thousands of border pillars missing on Nepal, Bhutan borders

More than 2,700 border pillars along India's open border with Nepal have either gone "missing" or are "damaged", setting alarm bells ringing in the internal security establishment of the country.
The condition of these crucial security structures is not only bad along this fence-less 1,751-km long border on the eastern flank of the country, but also along the Bhutan frontier where close to 900 border pillars are either damaged or have simply vanished.
According to a latest confidential report sent by the field formations of security agencies to the Ministry of Home Affairs (updated till June, 2014), a total of 1,451 border pillars are "missing" while 1,282 have been "damaged" along the Indo-Nepal border over a period of time.

This frontier, notorious for the movement of smugglers and terrorists, has a total of 6,402 such structures, which are used by border guarding force SSB as a guide for patrolling and area domination.
In the absence of these structures, the SSB troops, for some time now, have begun using grid references on their GPS devices or marking local landmarks to patrol the Indian side.
The report, accessed by PTI, mentions that due to lack of border pillars, there have been adverse encroachments at at least 14 locations in the Indian territory while the same number of these exist on the Nepalese side.

Worried over the issue, Home Ministry recently got in touch with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and decided that the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) will undertake repair and maintenance of these structures which till now was the job of the respective border district administrations.
When contacted, SSB Inspector General (Operations and Intelligence) Somesh Goyal confirmed that the paramilitary has indeed been asked to take up the task.
"We have been recently told by the Home Ministry to start repair and maintenance of the border pillars along both the Nepal and Bhutan borders," he told PTI.