Srinagar: Following the intermittent cross border firing and shelling, the authorities on Saturday have asked the people living in as many as 27 villages along the Line of Control (LoC) in Nowshera sector of Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri district to be ready to vacate at short notice, media reports suggested today.

The LoC has been tense and on a heightened state of alert since a car suicide bomber killed 49 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers in Pulwama on February 14.

Villagers have been asked to carry only essential belongings and shift to temporary shelters — schools and government buildings — that are beyond the arc of Pakistani guns. “Mortar shells and machine-gun fire started a day before. It wasn’t too heavy, just intermittent. We haven’t had casualties yet,” Ramesh Choudhry the village head Hindustan Times.

Pointing to a house damaged in the latest round of hostilities, he said, “This was hit by an 81-mm mortar shell.”

Differentiating between calibres of weapons is as important as distinguishing between a good and bad harvest for this farming community of about 830 people living along the LoC. Villagers here have vacated their homes many times in the last few years. “As many as three times in the last four years,” Vijay Choudhury of Kalal told Hindustan Times.

While people have learnt to adapt quickly, the administration is still struggling. For instance, the temporary shelters earmarked for Kalal and its adjoining villages of Khori and Gagrote – of 3000 people in total — have just 14 rooms and six toilets. Although the state claims to have built nearly 1,400 hardened shelters for villagers along the LoC and the International Boundary, none has built here, reported Hindustan Times.

On Friday morning, Rajouri deputy commissioner Mohammed Ajaz Assad visited the area. “The villagers want to stay back. We have set up camps and informed them about the evacuation plan,” he said. In the evening, there were reports of intermittent cross-border firing in Kalal and adjoining areas.

On Thursday, the Union home ministry released a statement saying all paramilitary personnel deployed in Jammu and Kashmir would be entitled to take commercial flights to either join duty or go on leave. The government also cleared airlifting paramilitary troopers on the Jammu-Srinagar, Srinagar-Jammu and other sectors, Hindustan Timesreported.